| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: concluded, and till the purchase-money had been paid,
he had spent daily some time on board the Fair Maid.
The money had been paid this very morning, and now,
all at once, there was positively no ship that he could
go on board of when he liked; no ship that would need
his presence in order to do her work--to live. It seemed
an incredible state of affairs, something too bizarre to
last. And the sea was full of craft of all sorts. There
was that prau lying so still swathed in her shroud of
sewn palm-leaves--she too had her indispensable man.
They lived through each other, this Malay he had never
End of the Tether |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson: and some time, by perpetual staring and glowering and
rewriting, order will emerge. It is indeed a queer hope;
there is one piece for instance that I want in - I cannot put
it one place for a good reason - I cannot put it another for
a better - and every time I look at it, I turn sick and put
the Ms. away.
Well, your letter hasn't come, and a number of others are
missing. It looks as if a mail-bag had gone on, so I'll
blame nobody, and proceed to business.
It looks as if I was going to send you the first three
chapters of my Grandfather. . . . If they were set up, it
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: method of collocation of these stones--in the order of their
arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which
overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around--
above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement,
and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its
evidence--the evidence of the sentience--was to be seen, he said,
(and I here started as he spoke,) in the gradual yet certain
condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and
the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that
silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for
centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made
The Fall of the House of Usher |
