| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad: Both recognise the same conventions, and have a working knowledge
of each other's methods and of the routine of their respective
trades. They understand each other, which is advantageous to both,
and establishes a sort of amenity in their relations. Products of
the same machine, one classed as useful and the other as noxious,
they take the machine for granted in different ways, but with a
seriousness essentially the same. The mind of Chief Inspector Heat
was inaccessible to ideas of revolt. But his thieves were not
rebels. His bodily vigour, his cool inflexible manner, his courage
and his fairness, had secured for him much respect and some
adulation in the sphere of his early successes. He had felt
The Secret Agent |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift: may be taken, to ease the nation of so grievous an incumbrance.
But I am not in the least pain upon that matter, because it is
very well known, that they are every day dying, and rotting, by
cold and famine, and filth, and vermin, as fast as can be
reasonably expected. And as to the young labourers, they are now
in almost as hopeful a condition. They cannot get work, and
consequently pine away from want of nourishment, to a degree,
that if at any time they are accidentally hired to common labour,
they have not strength to perform it, and thus the country and
themselves are happily delivered from the evils to come.
I have too long digressed, and therefore shall return to my
A Modest Proposal |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: they cast away even that last dream, and cried, "We have no king but
Caesar," they spoke the secret of their hearts. It was a Caesar, a
Jewish Caesar, for whom they had been longing for centuries. And if
they could not have such a deliverer, they would have none: they would
take up with the best embodiment of brute Titanic power which they could
find, and crucify the embodiment of Righteousness and Love. Amid all
the metaphysical schools of Alexandria, I know none so deeply
instructive as that school of the Rabbis, "the glory of Israel."
But you will say: "This does not look like a school likely to
regenerate Alexandrian thought." True: and yet it did regenerate it,
both for good and for evil; for these men had among them and preserved
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