| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad: the ship home. For the rest, I was almost as much of a stranger on
board as himself, I said. And at the moment I felt it most acutely.
I felt that it would take very little to make me a suspect person
in the eyes of the ship's company.
He had turned about meantime; and we, the two strangers in the ship,
faced each other in identical attitudes.
"Your ladder--" he murmured, after a silence. "Who'd have thought
of finding a ladder hanging over at night in a ship anchored out here!
I felt just then a very unpleasant faintness. After the life I've
been leading for nine weeks, anybody would have got out of condition.
I wasn't capable of swimming round as far as your rudder chains.
The Secret Sharer |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: desirous of serving you."
Simeon questioned the disguised devil, and seeing that he was an
intelligent man took him into his service.
The new General taught Simeon how to strengthen his army until it
became very powerful. New implements of warfare were introduced.
Cannons capable of throwing one hundred balls a minute were also
constructed, and these, it was expected, would be of deadly
effect in battle.
Simeon, on the advice of his new General, ordered all young men
above a certain age to report for drill. On the same advice
Simeon established gun-shops, where immense numbers of cannons
The Kreutzer Sonata |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: inflicted a hundred or a thousand years after an offence had been
committed. Suffering there might be as a part of education, but not
hopeless or protracted; as there might be a retrogression of individuals or
of bodies of men, yet not such as to interfere with a plan for the
improvement of the whole (compare Laws.)
9. But some one will say: That we cannot reason from the seen to the
unseen, and that we are creating another world after the image of this,
just as men in former ages have created gods in their own likeness. And
we, like the companions of Socrates, may feel discouraged at hearing our
favourite 'argument from analogy' thus summarily disposed of. Like
himself, too, we may adduce other arguments in which he seems to have
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