| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Land of Footprints by Stewart Edward White: be considered not as a promise, but as an explanation. No one
knows better than I how limited my African experience is, both in
time and extent, bounded as it is by East Equatorial Africa and a
year. Hundreds of men are better qualified than myself to write
just this book; but unfortunately they will not do it.
II. AFRICA
In looking back on the multitudinous pictures that the word
Africa bids rise in my memory, four stand out more distinctly
than the others. Strangely enough, these are by no means all
pictures of average country-the sort of thing one would describe
as typical. Perhaps, in a way, they symbolize more the spirit of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: off terribly--till at the end of the sixth week Obadiah's suspicions (like
a good man's) fell upon the Bull.
Now the parish being very large, my father's Bull, to speak the truth of
him, was no way equal to the department; he had, however, got himself,
somehow or other, thrust into employment--and as he went through the
business with a grave face, my father had a high opinion of him.
--Most of the townsmen, an' please your worship, quoth Obadiah, believe
that 'tis all the Bull's fault--
--But may not a cow be barren? replied my father, turning to Doctor Slop.
It never happens: said Dr. Slop, but the man's wife may have come before
her time naturally enough--Prithee has the child hair upon his head?--added
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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: bedroom above a wild heap of rags, broken mahogany, and
splintered boards which had been Mr. Nicholas B.'s bedstead.
Detecting the servant in the act of stealing away with a japanned
tin box, they tore it from him, and because he resisted they
threw him out of the dining-room window. The house was on one
floor, but raised well above the ground, and the fall was so
serious that the man remained lying stunned till the cook and a
stable-boy ventured forth at dusk from their hiding-places and
picked him up. But by that time the mob had departed, carrying
off the tin box, which they supposed to be full of paper money.
Some distance from the house, in the middle of a field, they
A Personal Record |
