| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: many (not Catholics merely) who require their heroes and saints to
be infallible; to these the story will be painful; not to the true
lovers, patrons, and servants of mankind.
And I take it, this is a type of our division; that you are one of
those who have an eye for faults and failures; that you take a
pleasure to find and publish them; and that, having found them, you
make haste to forget the overvailing virtues and the real success
which had alone introduced them to your knowledge. It is a
dangerous frame of mind. That you may understand how dangerous,
and into what a situation it has already brought you, we will (if
you please) go hand-in-hand through the different phrases of your
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad: steam pinnace went off to her ship to bring over a
few bluejackets to furl my sails for me.
One of the surgeons had remained on board. He
came out of the forecastle looking impenetrable,
and noticed my inquiring gaze.
"There's nobody dead in there, if that's what
you want to know," he said deliberately. Then
added in a tone of wonder: "The whole crew!"
"And very bad?"
"And very bad," he repeated. His eyes were
roaming all over the ship. "Heavens! What's
The Shadow Line |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: each of her lenses, over which something convex and grotesque, like
the eyes of a large insect, something that now represented her
whole personality, seemed, as out of the orifice of a prison, to
strain forward and press. The face had shrunk away: it looked
smaller, appeared even to look plain; it was at all events, so far
as the effect on a spectator was concerned, wholly sacrificed to
this huge apparatus of sight. There was no smile in it, and she
made no motion to take my offered hand.
"I had no idea you were down here!" I said and I wondered whether
she didn't know me at all or knew me only by my voice.
"You thought I was Mrs. Meldrum," she ever so quietly answered.
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