| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad: he put his head in the second mate's door to inform him of my
unheard-of caprice to take a five hours' anchor watch on myself.
I heard the other raise his voice incredulously--"What? The
Captain himself?" Then a few more murmurs, a door closed, then another.
A few moments later I went on deck.
My strangeness, which had made me sleepless, had prompted that
unconventional arrangement, as if I had expected in those solitary
hours of the night to get on terms with the ship of which I
knew nothing, manned by men of whom I knew very little more.
Fast alongside a wharf, littered like any ship in port with a
tangle of unrelated things, invaded by unrelated shore people,
The Secret Sharer |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain: the uncomfortablest material in the world for a night
shirt, yet plenty used it for that -- tax collectors, and
reformers, and one-horse kings with a defective title,
and those sorts of people; then you put on your shoes
-- flat-boats roofed over with interleaving bands of
steel -- and screw your clumsy spurs into the heels.
Next you buckle your greaves on your legs, and your
cuisses on your thighs; then come your backplate and
your breastplate, and you begin to feel crowded; then
you hitch onto the breastplate the half-petticoat of
broad overlapping bands of steel which hangs down in
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Songs of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: What sound shall come but the old cry of the wind
In our inclement city? what return
But the image of the emptiness of youth,
Filled with the sound of footsteps and that voice
Of discontent and rapture and despair?
So, as in darkness, from the magic lamp,
The momentary pictures gleam and fade
And perish, and the night resurges - these
Shall I remember, and then all forget.
Apemama.
XXXV
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