| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield: collar and blew upon his soup as he spoke. "Now at nine o'clock I make
myself an English breakfast, but not much. Four slices of bread, two eggs,
two slices of cold ham, one plate of soup, two cups of tea--that is nothing
to you."
He asserted the fact so vehemently that I had not the courage to refute it.
All eyes were suddenly turned upon me. I felt I was bearing the burden of
the nation's preposterous breakfast--I who drank a cup of coffee while
buttoning my blouse in the morning.
"Nothing at all," cried Herr Hoffmann from Berlin. "Ach, when I was in
England in the morning I used to eat."
He turned up his eyes and his moustache, wiping the soup drippings from his
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dreams by Olive Schreiner: living has never seen her move: the oldest, oldest book records that she
lay here then, as she lies here now, with the sand about her. But listen!
Older than the oldest book, older than the oldest recorded memory of man,
on the Rocks of Language, on the hard-baked clay of Ancient Customs, now
crumbling to decay, are found the marks of her footsteps! Side by side
with his who stands beside her you may trace them; and you know that she
who now lies there once wandered free over the rocks with him."
And I said, "Why does she lie there now?"
And he said, "I take it, ages ago the Age-of-dominion-of-muscular-force
found her, and when she stooped low to give suck to her young, and her back
was broad, he put his burden of subjection on to it, and tied it on with
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Within the Tides by Joseph Conrad: As to the witches that's merely a conventional expression, and we
must take our man's word for it that it fits the case.
The Find was made in a box of books bought in London, in a street
which no longer exists, from a second-hand bookseller in the last
stage of decay. As to the books themselves they were at least
twentieth-hand, and on inspection turned out not worth the very
small sum of money I disbursed. It might have been some
premonition of that fact which made me say: "But I must have the
box too." The decayed bookseller assented by the careless, tragic
gesture of a man already doomed to extinction.
A litter of loose pages at the bottom of the box excited my
Within the Tides |
