| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: lying stored in vaults; of the high-flying vice that moved in the
sunshine, and the stealth and swiftness of midnight murder. I have
said he was sick as if for home: the figure halts. He was like
some one lying in twilit, formless preexistence, and stretching out
his hands lovingly towards many-coloured, many-sounding life. It
was no wonder he was unhappy, he would go and tell the fish: they
were made for their life, wished for no more than worms and running
water, and a hole below a falling bank; but he was differently
designed, full of desires and aspirations, itching at the fingers,
lusting with the eyes, whom the whole variegated world could not
satisfy with aspects. The true life, the true bright sunshine, lay
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Collection of Antiquities by Honore de Balzac: unappreciated public servant, who ought by rights to be Minister of
Police. M. Sauvager, the deputy, was a thin, tall young man of five-
and-twenty, with a lengthy olive-hued countenance, black frizzled
hair, and deep-set eyes; the wide, dark rings beneath them were
completed by the wrinkled purple eyelids above. With a nose like the
beak of some bird of prey, a pinched mouth, and cheeks worn lean with
study and hollowed by ambition, he was the very type of a second-rate
personage on the lookout for something to turn up, and ready to do
anything if so he might get on in the world, while keeping within the
limitations of the possible and the forms of law. His pompous
expression was an admirable indication of the time-serving eloquence
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner: colonel, or a general, before we've done with him. I call them all
generals or colonels up here; it's safest, you know; if they're not that
today they will be tomorrow!"
This was intended as a joke, and in that hot weather, and in that dull
world, anything was good enough to laugh at: the third man smiled, but the
first speaker remained serious.
"I only know this," he said, "I'd teach these fellows a lesson, if any one
belonging to me had been among the people they left to be murdered here,
while they went gallivanting to the Transvaal. If my mother or sister had
been killed here, I'd have taken a pistol and blown out the brains of the
great Panjandrum, and the little ones after him. Fine administration of a
|
