| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: night, when he could not sleep, he kept on thinking
of the girl who gave him the first piece of bread he
had eaten in this foreign land. She had been
neither fierce nor angry, nor frightened. Her face
he remembered as the only comprehensible face
amongst all these faces that were as closed, as mys-
terious, and as mute as the faces of the dead who
are possessed of a knowledge beyond the compre-
hension of the living. I wonder whether the mem-
ory of her compassion prevented him from cutting
his throat. But there! I suppose I am an old sen-
Amy Foster |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Wrong Box by Stevenson & Osbourne: In front of him, in the corner by the door, there stood a portly
barrel; and let him turn them where he might, it was always to
the barrel that his eyes and his thoughts returned.
'Should I open it? Should I return it? Should I communicate with
Mr Sernitopolis at once?' he wondered. 'No,' he concluded
finally, 'nothing without Mr Finsbury's advice.' And he arose and
produced a shabby leathern desk. It opened without the formality
of unlocking, and displayed the thick cream-coloured notepaper on
which Mr Pitman was in the habit of communicating with the
proprietors of schools and the parents of his pupils. He placed
the desk on the table by the window, and taking a saucer of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Criminal Sociology by Enrico Ferri: even when not contrary to the law, as they sometimes are in Italy,
are always less stern than simple folk imagine when they read the
codes and the sentences. And criminals naturally judge of
punishments by their own experience, that is to say, in accordance
with their practical application, and not with the more or less
candid threats of the lawmaker.
If we add to vindictive feeling, historic traditions, oblivion of
bio-psychic differences of the social strata, the confounding of
exceptional laws and ordinary punishments, and of the varying
effective force of punishment, the attitude of the public mind and
the natural tendency of criminalists to think only of their two
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