| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad: "Oh, certainly" - just as the humour of the moment prompted him.
One night as we were lying on a bit of dry sand under the lee of a
rock, side by side, watching the light of our little vessel dancing
away at sea in the windy distance, Dominic spoke suddenly to me.
"I suppose Alphonso and Carlos, Carlos and Alphonso, they are
nothing to you, together or separately?"
I said: "Dominic, if they were both to vanish from the earth
together or separately it would make no difference to my feelings."
He remarked: "Just so. A man mourns only for his friends. I
suppose they are no more friends to you than they are to me. Those
Carlists make a great consumption of cartridges. That is well.
The Arrow of Gold |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Russia in 1919 by Arthur Ransome: exchange for what they could give capital. This was, of
course, referring to the opposition criticism that the Soviet
was prepared to sell Russia into the hands of the
"Anglo-American Imperialistic bandits." Rykov said that the main
condition of all concessions would be that they should not
effect the international structure of the Soviet Republic
and should not lead to the exploitation of the workmen.
They wanted railways, locomotives, and machines, and their
country was rich enough to pay for these things out of its
natural resources without sensible loss to the state or the
yielding of an inch in their programme of internal
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: The heap was the refuse of the burnt iron, and was not a hard
bed; the half-smothered warmth, too, penetrated her limbs,
dulling their pain and cold shiver.
Miserable enough she looked, lying there on the ashes like a
limp, dirty rag,--yet not an unfitting figure to crown the scene
of hopeless discomfort and veiled crime: more fitting, if one
looked deeper into the heart of things, at her thwarted woman's
form, her colorless life, her waking stupor that smothered pain
and hunger,--even more fit to be a type of her class. Deeper
yet if one could look, was there nothing worth reading in this
wet, faded thing, halfcovered with ashes? no story of a soul
Life in the Iron-Mills |
