| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini: freedom, are the sail-makers, the spinners, the ship-owners and the
slave-traders. The slave-traders! The men who live and grow rich
by a traffic in human flesh and blood in the colonies, are conducting
at home a campaign in the sacred name of liberty! Don't you see that
the whole movement is a movement of hucksters and traders and
peddling vassals swollen by wealth into envy of the power that lies
in birth alone? The money-changers in Paris who hold the bonds in
the national debt, seeing the parlous financial condition of the
State, tremble at the thought that it may lie in the power of a
single man to cancel the debt by bankruptcy. To secure themselves
they are burrowing underground to overthrow a state and build upon
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: uncared-for pen, flung away at the slightest provocation, and
under the stress of dire necessity hunted for without enthusiasm,
in a perfunctory, grumpy worry, in the "Where the devil is the
beastly thing gone to?" ungracious spirit. Where indeed! It
might have been reposing behind the sofa for a day or so. My
landlady's anaemic daughter (as Ollendorff would have expressed
it), though commendably neat, had a lordly, careless manner of
approaching her domestic duties. Or it might even be resting
delicately poised on its point by the side of the table-leg, and
when picked up show a gaping, inefficient beak which would have
discouraged any man of literary instincts. But not me! "Never
Some Reminiscences |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The King of the Golden River by John Ruskin: really can't."
"Can't what?" said the old gentleman.
"I can't let you in, sir--I can't, indeed; my brothers would
beat me to death, sir, if I thought of such a thing. What do you
want, sir?"
"Want?" said the old gentleman petulantly. "I want fire and
shelter, and there's your great fire there blazing, crackling, and
dancing on the walls with nobody to feel it. Let me in, I say; I
only want to warm myself."
Gluck had had his head, by this time, so long out of the window
that he began to feel it was really unpleasantly cold, and when he
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