| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: gratification of wealth he did not know enough to excite
his imagination with any visions of luxury. How could
he--the child of a drunken boiler-maker--going
straight from the workshop into the engine-room of a
north-country collier! But the notion of the absolute
idleness of wealth he could very well conceive. He
reveled in it, to forget his present troubles; he imagined
himself walking about the streets of Hull (he knew their
gutters well as a boy) with his pockets full of sov-
ereigns. He would buy himself a house; his married
sisters, their husbands, his old workshop chums, would
 End of the Tether |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: low, a wide green trough of pastures and hedges
merging inland into a vista of purple tints and
flowing lines closing the view.
In this valley down to Brenzett and Colebrook
and up to Darnford, the market town fourteen
miles away, lies the practice of my friend Kennedy.
He had begun life as surgeon in the Navy, and
afterwards had been the companion of a famous
traveller, in the days when there were continents
with unexplored interiors. His papers on the
fauna and flora made him known to scientific socie-
 Amy Foster |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: to tenants. In order to rent a house he would promise repairs which the owner
had not authorized. It was suspected that he juggled inventories of furnished
houses so that when the tenant left he had to pay for articles which had never
been in the house and the price of which Graff put into his pocket. Babbitt
had not been able to prove these suspicions, and though he had rather planned
to discharge Graff he had never quite found time for it.
Now into Babbitt's private room charged a red-faced man, panting, "Look here!
I've come to raise particular merry hell, and unless you have that fellow
pinched, I will!" "What's--Calm down, o' man. What's trouble?"
"Trouble! Huh! Here's the trouble--"
"Sit down and take it easy! They can hear you all over the building!"
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