| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from 1984 by George Orwell: outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of them with her hair coming
down, had got hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it out of
one another's hands. For a moment they were both tugging, and then the
handle came off. Winston watched them disgustedly. And yet, just for a
moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only
a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that
about anything that mattered?
He wrote:
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they
have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcription from one of the
1984 |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Almayer's Folly by Joseph Conrad: did she not belong rightfully to the victorious Rajah? Even the
evident kindness of the terrible old man must spring, she
thought, from admiration for his captive, and the flattered
vanity eased for her the pangs of sorrow after such an awful
calamity. Perhaps had she known of the high walls, the quiet
gardens, and the silent nuns of the Samarang convent, where her
destiny was leading her, she would have sought death in her dread
and hate of such a restraint. But in imagination she pictured to
herself the usual life of a Malay girl--the usual succession of
heavy work and fierce love, of intrigues, gold ornaments, of
domestic drudgery, and of that great but occult influence which
Almayer's Folly |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Soul of a Bishop by H. G. Wells: hands of intense and conservative men. These last--narrow,
fearful, and suspicious--have sought in every age to save the
precious gift of religion by putting it into a prison of formulae
and asseverations. Bear that in mind when you are pressed to
definition. It is as if you made a box hermetically sealed to
save the treasure of a fresh breeze from the sea. But they have
sought out exact statements and tortuous explanations of the
plain truth of God, they have tried to take down God in writing,
to commit him to documents, to embalm his living faith as though
it would otherwise corrupt. So they have lost God and fallen into
endless differences, disputes, violence, and darkness about
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