| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad: and untried as yet by a position of the fullest responsibility,
I was willing to take the adequacy of the others for granted.
They had simply to be equal to their tasks; but I wondered
how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception
of one's own personality every man sets up for himself secretly.
Meantime the chief mate, with an almost visible effect of collaboration
on the part of his round eyes and frightful whiskers, was trying to evolve
a theory of the anchored ship. His dominant trait was to take all things
into earnest consideration. He was of a painstaking turn of mind.
As he used to say, he "liked to account to himself" for practically
everything that came in his way, down to a miserable scorpion
The Secret Sharer |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac: have found a place in the Museum of Arts and Crafts to illustrate the
early efforts of French carpentry. These windows were glazed with
small squares of glass so green that, but for his good eyes, the young
man could not have seen the blue-checked cotton curtains which
screened the mysteries of the room from profane eyes. Now and then the
watcher, weary of his fruitless contemplation, or of the silence in
which the house was buried, like the whole neighborhood, dropped his
eyes towards the lower regions. An involuntary smile parted his lips
each time he looked at the shop, where, in fact, there were some
laughable details.
A formidable wooden beam, resting on four pillars, which appeared to
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: answer to all the past, the vision at the dread clearness of which
he turned as cold as the stone beneath him. Everything fell
together, confessed, explained, overwhelmed; leaving him most of
all stupefied at the blindness he had cherished. The fate he had
been marked for he had met with a vengeance--he had emptied the cup
to the lees; he had been the man of his time, THE man, to whom
nothing on earth was to have happened. That was the rare stroke--
that was his visitation. So he saw it, as we say, in pale horror,
while the pieces fitted and fitted. So SHE had seen it while he
didn't, and so she served at this hour to drive the truth home. It
was the truth, vivid and monstrous, that all the while he had
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