| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad: and the "Bless my soul--you don't say so" type of intellect.
My double gave me an inkling of his thoughts by saying:
"My father's a parson in Norfolk. Do you see me before a judge
and jury on that charge? For myself I can't see the necessity.
There are fellows that an angel from heaven--And I am not that.
He was one of those creatures that are just simmering
all the time with a silly sort of wickedness.
Miserable devils that have no business to live at all.
He wouldn't do his duty and wouldn't let anybody else do theirs.
But what's the good of talking! You know well enough the sort
of ill-conditioned snarling cur--"
The Secret Sharer |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: I found nothing at all, and he was therefore an angel.
He never spoke of his school, never mentioned a comrade or a master;
and I, for my part, was quite too much disgusted to allude to them.
Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part
is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was.
But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain,
and I had more pains than one. I was in receipt in these days
of disturbing letters from home, where things were not going well.
But with my children, what things in the world mattered?
That was the question I used to put to my scrappy retirements.
I was dazzled by their loveliness.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: knew the hand, kissed the envelope, and laid it on her heart; so
that she too died upon a pleasure. Half an hour after midnight, on
the eighth of February, she fell asleep: it is supposed in her
seventy-eighth year.
Thus, in the space of less than ten months, the four seniors of
this family were taken away; but taken with such features of
opportunity in time or pleasant courage in the sufferer, that grief
was tempered with a kind of admiration. The effect on Fleeming was
profound. His pious optimism increased and became touched with
something mystic and filial. 'The grave is not good, the
approaches to it are terrible,' he had written in the beginning of
|
