| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: together in a laborious and elementary fashion fragments of belief,
unsoldered and separate, lacking the unity of phrases fashioned by the
old believers. Together they groped in this difficult region, where
the unfinished, the unfulfilled, the unwritten, the unreturned, came
together in their ghostly way and wore the semblance of the complete
and the satisfactory. The future emerged more splendid than ever from
this construction of the present. Books were to be written, and since
books must be written in rooms, and rooms must have hangings, and
outside the windows there must be land, and an horizon to that land,
and trees perhaps, and a hill, they sketched a habitation for
themselves upon the outline of great offices in the Strand and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Records of a Family of Engineers by Robert Louis Stevenson: [Monday, 30th July]
The ninetieth or last course of the building having been
laid to-day, which brought the masonry to the height of one
hundred and two feet six inches, the lintel of the light-room
door, being the finishing-stone of the exterior walls, was
laid with due formality by the writer, who, at the same time,
pronounced the following benediction: "May the Great Architect
of the Universe, under whose blessing this perilous work has
prospered, preserve it as a guide to the mariner."
[Friday, 3rd Aug.]
At three p.m., the necessary preparations having been
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Men of Iron by Howard Pyle: rim of gold. Myles scarcely dared touch it; he gazed at it with
an unconcealed delight that warmed the smith's honest heart.
"I have another piece of Milan here," said he. "Did I ever show
thee my dagger, Master Gascoyne?"
"Nay," said the squire.
The smith unlocked a great oaken chest in the corner of the shop,
lifted the lid, and brought thence a beautiful dagger with the
handle of ebony and silver-gilt, and a sheath of Spanish leather,
embossed and gilt. The keen, well- tempered blade was beautifully
engraved and inlaid with niello-work, representing a group of
figures in a then popular subject--the dance of Death. It was a
Men of Iron |
