| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Within the Tides by Joseph Conrad: first time the old dollars had been called in by our Government in
exchange for a new issue. Just about the time when I left these
parts to go home for a long stay. Every trader in the islands was
thinking of getting his old dollars sent up here in time, and the
demand for empty French wine cases - you know the dozen of vermouth
or claret size - was something unprecedented. The custom was to
pack the dollars in little bags of a hundred each. I don't know
how many bags each case would hold. A good lot. Pretty tidy sums
must have been moving afloat just then. But let us get away from
here. Won't do to stay in the sun. Where could we - ? I know!
let us go to those tiffin-rooms over there."
Within the Tides |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: As e'er was mossy bed
Whereon the wood-nymphs lie
With languid limbs in summer's sultry hours.
Here, too, were living flowers,
Which, like a bud compacted,
Their purple cups contracted;
And now in open blossom spread,
Stretch'd, like green anthers, many a seeking head.
And arborets of jointed stone were there,
And plants of fibres fine as silkworm's thread;
Yea, beautiful as mermaid's golden hair
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: a thousand reasons to her advantage; to have allowed oneself to
believe in a sudden and irresistible affinity; to have pictured, under
the promptings of transient excitement, a love-adventure in an age
when romances are written precisely because they never happen; to have
dreamed of balconies, guitars, stratagems, and bolts, enwrapped in
Almaviva's cloak; and, after inditing a poem in fancy, to stop at the
door of a house of ill-fame, and, crowning all, to discern in Rosina's
bashfulness a reticence imposed by the police--is not all this, I say,
an experience familiar to many a man who would not own it?
The most natural feelings are those we are least willing to confess,
and among them is fatuity. When the lesson is carried no further, the
Gambara |
