| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: show it to be a fact. Looked at a posteriori, we find that where
the one trait exists the other is most developed, while an absence
of the second seems to prevent the full growth of the first.
This is true both in general and in detail. Courtesy increases, as
we travel eastward round the world, coincidently with a decrease in
the sense of self. Asia is more courteous than Europe, Europe than
America. Particular races show the same concomitance of
characteristics. France, the most impersonal nation of Europe, is at
the same time the most polite.
Considered a priori, the connection between the two is not far to
seek. Impersonality, by lessening the interest in one's self,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Blix by Frank Norris: story had run from him with a facility that had surprised and
delighted him; words came to him without effort, ranging
themselves into line with the promptitude of well-drilled
soldiery; sentences and paragraphs marched down the clean-swept
spaces of his paper, like companies and platoons defiling upon
review; his chapters were brigades that he marshaled at will,
falling them in one behind the other, each preceded by its
chapter-head, like an officer in the space between two divisions.
In the guise of a commander-in-chief sitting his horse upon an
eminence that overlooked the field of operations, Condy at last
took in the entire situation at a glance, and, with the force and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: which you did not demand from me--but remember that all the toil
and all the pain were mine. In your earthly life you haunted me,
Almayer. Consider that this was taking a great liberty. Since
you were always complaining of being lost to the world, you
should remember that if I had not believed enough in your
existence to let you haunt my rooms in Bessborough Gardens, you
would have been much more lost. You affirm that had I been
capable of looking at you with a more perfect detachment and a
greater simplicity, I might have perceived better the inward
marvellousness which, you insist, attended your career upon that
tiny pin-point of light, hardly visible far, far below us, where
A Personal Record |
