| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses
of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in
uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened,
became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest.
These moribund shapes were free as air--and nearly as thin.
I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes under the trees.
Then, glancing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones
reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree,
and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me,
enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths
of the orbs, which died out slowly. The man seemed young--
Heart of Darkness |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: object of compassion, whose distress, and silence under it, called out the
louder for a friendly lift: the wife of the parson of the parish was
touched with pity; and having often lamented an inconvenience to which her
husband's flock had for many years been exposed, inasmuch as there was no
such thing as a midwife, of any kind or degree, to be got at, let the case
have been never so urgent, within less than six or seven long miles riding;
which said seven long miles in dark nights and dismal roads, the country
thereabouts being nothing but a deep clay, was almost equal to fourteen;
and that in effect was sometimes next to having no midwife at all; it came
into her head, that it would be doing as seasonable a kindness to the whole
parish, as to the poor creature herself, to get her a little instructed in
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: It was extravagant, I admit, the way she lived for the art of the
pen. Her passion visibly preyed on her, and in her presence I felt
almost tepid. I got hold of "Deep Down" again: it was a desert in
which she had lost herself, but in which too she had dug a
wonderful hole in the sand - a cavity out of which Corvick had
still more remarkably pulled her.
Early in March I had a telegram from her, in consequence of which I
repaired immediately to Chelsea, where the first thing she said to
me was: "He has got it, he has got it!"
She was moved, as I could see, to such depths that she must mean
the great thing. "Vereker's idea?"
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