| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: advance the plea of youth in excuse of the naiveness to be found
in these pages, he would be likely to say "Bosh!" in a column and
a half of fierce print. Yet a writer is no older than his first
published book, and, notwithstanding the vain appearances of
decay which attend us in this transitory life, I stand here with
the wreath of only fifteen short summers on my brow.
With the remark, then, that at such tender age some naiveness of
feeling and expression is excusable, I proceed to admit that,
upon the whole, my previous state of existence was not a good
equipment for a literary life. Perhaps I should not have used the
word literary. That word presupposes an intimacy of acquaintance
Some Reminiscences |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: Regime to begin in the seventeenth century. I should date its
commencement--as far as that of anything so vague, unsystematic,
indeed anarchic, can be defined--from the end of the Thirty Years'
War, and the peace of Westphalia in 1648.
For by that time the mighty spiritual struggles and fierce religious
animosities of the preceding century had worn themselves out. And,
as always happens, to a period of earnest excitement had succeeded
one of weariness, disgust, half-unbelief in the many questions for
which so much blood had been shed. No man had come out of the
battle with altogether clean hands; some not without changing sides
more than once. The war had ended as one, not of nations, not even
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy: heard that she was living in a small provincial town and was very
poor.
'Why am I thinking about her?' he asked himself, but he could not
cease doing so. 'Where is she? How is she getting on? Is she
still as unhappy as she was then when she had to show us how to
swim on the floor? But why should I think about her? What am I
doing? I must put an end to myself.'
And again he felt afraid, and again, to escape from that thought,
he went on thinking about Pashenka.
So he lay for a long time, thinking now of his unavoidable end
and now of Pashenka. She presented herself to him as a means of
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