| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: to exist, missing all along the varied forms of destruction by a
hair's-breadth, saving my body, that's clear, and perhaps my soul
also, but not without some damage here and there to the fine edge
of my conscience, that heirloom of the ages, of the race, of the
group, of the family, colourable and plastic, fashioned by the
words, the looks, the acts, and even by the silences and
abstentions surrounding one's childhood; tinged in a complete
scheme of delicate shades and crude colours by the inherited
traditions, beliefs, or prejudices--unaccountable, despotic,
persuasive, and often, in its texture, romantic.
And often romantic! . . . The matter in hand, however, is to
A Personal Record |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Somebody's Little Girl by Martha Young: the row and gave to each little girl two cakes, or sometimes maybe
she walked three times down the row, and then each little girl had
three cakes; but no one little girl ever had more than every other
little girl.
Always Sister Angela sat a little way off from the row of the little
girls. She always sat on a bench under the great magnoliatree and
watched the tiny girls as they ate their tiny cakes.
And always the pink checked towel waved itself ever so softly to and
fro on the lowest limb of the arbor-vitae-tree, for that was the way
that pink checked towels did to help to dry themselves after helping
to dry so many little pink fingers. Often, so often, little brown
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: plaintiveness. The singer can easily move us to tears or to
laughter, but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning
joy? When, in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our
wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the
house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow far or near, I think to
myself, "There is one of us well, at any rate,"--and with a
sudden gush return to my senses.
We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking
in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last,
just before setting, after a cold, gray day, reached a clear
stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest morning
Walking |
