| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Tapestried Chamber by Walter Scott: neighbourhood and to many of my friends, I feared some prejudice
might be entertained by the first occupant of the Tapestried
Chamber, which might tend to revive the evil report which it had
laboured under, and so disappoint my purpose of rendering it a
useful part or the house. I must confess, my dear Browne, that
your arrival yesterday, agreeable to me for a thousand reasons
besides, seemed the most favourable opportunity of removing the
unpleasant rumours which attached to the room, since your courage
was indubitable, and your mind free of any preoccupation on the
subject. I could not, therefore, have chosen a more fitting
subject for my experiment."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Chance by Joseph Conrad: only security. I don't know how to explain it clearly. Look! Even
a small child lives, plays and suffers in terms of its conception of
its own existence. Imagine, if you can, a fact coming in suddenly
with a force capable of shattering that very conception itself. It
was only because of the girl being still so much of a child that she
escaped mental destruction; that, in other words she got over it.
Could one conceive of her more mature, while still as ignorant as
she was, one must conclude that she would have become an idiot on
the spot--long before the end of that experience. Luckily, people,
whether mature or not mature (and who really is ever mature?) are
for the most part quite incapable of understanding what is happening
Chance |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his
hospitality and so become authorities on his past, had increased
all summer until he fell just short of being news. Contemporary
legends such as the "underground pipe-line to Canada." attached
themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he
didn't live in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house
and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore. Just why
these inventions were a source of satisfaction to James Gatz of North
Dakota, isn't easy to say.
James Gatz--that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had
changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that
The Great Gatsby |
