| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad: doing all the same. You'd better take this confounded hat off. I
can't let you go out, old girl," he added in a softened voice.
Mrs Verloc's mind got hold of that declaration with morbid
tenacity. The man who had taken Stevie out from under her very
eyes to murder him in a locality whose name was at the moment not
present to her memory would not allow her go out. Of course he
wouldn't.
Now he had murdered Stevie he would never let her go. He would
want to keep her for nothing. And on this characteristic
reasoning, having all the force of insane logic, Mrs Verloc's
disconnected wits went to work practically. She could slip by him,
The Secret Agent |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: You will say, perhaps, I am too sensitive, that sights as painful
abound in cancer hospitals and are confronted daily by doctors and
nurses. I have long learned to admire and envy the doctors and the
nurses. But there is no cancer hospital so large and populous as
Kalawao and Kalaupapa; and in such a matter every fresh case, like
every inch of length in the pipe of an organ, deepens the note of
the impression; for what daunts the onlooker is that monstrous sum
of human suffering by which he stands surrounded. Lastly, no
doctor or nurse is called upon to enter once for all the doors of
that gehenna; they do not say farewell, they need not abandon hope,
on its sad threshold; they but go for a time to their high calling,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pathology of Lying, Etc. by William and Mary Healy: case histories.
The question of inheritance of similar mental traits is, of
course, important. We have found absolutely no proof of the
trait of pathological lying, as such, being inherited. The
reader will note with interest particularly the facts in Cases 2
and 4, where we at first thought we had to deal with inheritance,
but later found there was no blood relationship between the
supposed parent and child. In those instances the lying of the
younger individual was much more likely to be the result of
psychic contagion, and this also may be largely the explanation
of Cases 6 and 8, where an older relative was well known to be a
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