| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: hung round his neck and a hammer in his hand, roamed about the
empty decks, knocking out the wedges of the hatches and dropping
them into the bag conscientiously. Having nothing to do I joined
our two engineers at the door of the engine-room. It was near
breakfast-time.
"He's turned up early, hasn't he?" commented the second engineer,
and smiled indifferently. He was an abstemious man, with a good
digestion and a placid, reasonable view of life even when hungry.
"Yes," I said. "Shut up with the old man. Some very particular
business."
"He will spin him a damned endless yarn," observed the chief
A Personal Record |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac: own island, where law rules everything, where all is automatic in
every station of life, where the exercise of virtue appears to be the
necessary working of a machine which goes by clockwork. Fortifications
of polished steel rise around the Englishwoman behind the golden wires
of her household cage (where the feed-box and the drinking-cup, the
perches and the food are exquisite in quality), but they make her
irresistibly attractive. No people ever trained married women so
carefully to hypocrisy by holding them rigidly between the two
extremes of death or social station; for them there is no middle path
between shame and honor; either the wrong is completed or it does not
exist; it is all or nothing,--Hamlet's "To be or not to be." This
The Lily of the Valley |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Tapestried Chamber by Walter Scott: was, the figure of a little woman passed between the bed and the
fire. The back of this form was turned to me, and I could
observe, from the shoulders and neck, it was that of an old
woman, whose dress was an old-fashioned gown, which I think
ladies call a sacque--that is, a sort of robe completely loose in
the body, but gathered into broad plaits upon the neck and
shoulders, which fall down to the ground, and terminate in a
species of train.
"I thought the intrusion singular enough, but never harboured for
a moment the idea that what I saw was anything more than the
mortal form of some old woman about the establishment, who had a
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