| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: modern civilisation is really dominant, men whose bulk and mere animal
strength would have made them as warriors invaluable members of any
primitive community, and who would have been valuable even in any simpler
civilisation than our own, as machines of toil; but who, owing to lack of
intellectual or delicate manual training, have now no form of labour to
offer society which it stands really in need of, and who therefore tend to
form our Great Male Unemployed--a body which finds the only powers it
possesses so little needed by its fellows that, in return for its intensest
physical labour, it hardly earns the poorest sustenance. The material
conditions of life have been rapidly modified, and the man has not been
modified with them; machinery has largely filled his place in his old field
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen: how could I suppose, when she so earnestly, so warmly insisted
on sharing my fate, whatever it might be, that any thing
but the most disinterested affection was her inducement?
And even now, I cannot comprehend on what motive she acted,
or what fancied advantage it could be to her, to be
fettered to a man for whom she had not the smallest regard,
and who had only two thousand pounds in the world.
She could not foresee that Colonel Brandon would give me a
living."
"No; but she might suppose that something would occur
in your favour; that your own family might in time relent.
Sense and Sensibility |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: intricate it was a carpet with a figure of its own; but the figure
was not the figure I was looking for. On sending a review of it to
THE MIDDLE I was surprised to learn from the office that a notice
was already in type. When the paper came out I had no hesitation
in attributing this article, which I thought rather vulgarly
overdone, to Drayton Deane, who in the old days had been something
of a friend of Corvick's, yet had only within a few weeks made the
acquaintance of his widow. I had had an early copy of the book,
but Deane had evidently had an earlier. He lacked all the same the
light hand with which Corvick had gilded the gingerbread - he laid
on the tinsel in splotches.
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