| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: to his temptations if not his conscience?
And besides--this, remember, is the place and the moment of
perfectly open talk--I think that all ambitions are lawful except
those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of
mankind. All intellectual and artistic ambitions are
permissible, up to and even beyond the limit of prudent sanity.
They can hurt no one. If they are mad, then so much the worse
for the artist. Indeed, as virtue is said to be, such ambitions
are their own reward. Is it such a very mad presumption to
believe in the sovereign power of one's art, to try for other
means, for other ways of affirming this belief in the deeper
A Personal Record |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: maintenance and his reward.
After I had sat by him a few minutes I passed my arm over his big
soft shoulder--wherever you touched him you found equally little
firmness--and said in a tone of which the suppliance fell oddly on
my own ear: "Come back to town with me, old friend--come back and
spend the evening." I wanted to hold him, I wanted to keep him,
and at Waterloo, an hour later, I telegraphed possessively to the
Mulvilles. When he objected, as regards staying all night, that he
had no things, I asked him if he hadn't everything of mine. I had
abstained from ordering dinner, and it was too late for
preliminaries at a club; so we were reduced to tea and fried fish
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: shot eyes and a peculiar dusky complexion. He hardly waited
till they found their seats, before, raising one hand, and
stooping with his mouth above his plate, he put up a prayer
for a blessing on the food and a spirit of gratitude in the
eaters, and thereupon, and without more civility, fell to.
But it was notable that he was no less speedily satisfied
than he had been greedy to begin. He pushed his plate away
and drummed upon the table.
'These are silly prayers,' said he, 'that they teach us. Eat
and be thankful, that's no such wonder. Speak to me of
starving - there's the touch. You're a man, they tell me,
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