The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Almayer's Folly by Joseph Conrad: Almayer's campong from the rest of the settlement. The thick
bushes growing on the bank were hiding from her sight the large
courtyard with its cooking shed. Above them rose several thin
columns of smoke, and from behind the sound of strange voices
informed Taminah that the Men of the Sea belonging to the warship
had already landed and were camped between the ditch and the
house. To the left one of Almayer's slave-girls came down to the
ditch and bent over the shiny water, washing a kettle. To the
right the tops of the banana plantation, visible above the
bushes, swayed and shook under the touch of invisible hands
gathering the fruit. On the calm water several canoes moored to
Almayer's Folly |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac: who only redeemed his defects by the qualities which you lack."
While detailing these faults of the picture Schinner saw on Fougeres'
face so deep an expression of sadness that he carried him off to
dinner and tried to console him. The next morning at seven o'clock
Fougeres was at his easel working over the rejected picture; he warmed
the colors; he made the corrections suggested by Schinner, he touched
up his figures. Then, disgusted with such patching, he carried the
picture to Elie Magus. Elie Magus, a sort of Dutch-Flemish-Belgian,
had three reasons for being what he became,--rich and avaricious.
Coming last from Bordeaux, he was just starting in Paris, selling old
pictures and living on the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle. Fougeres, who
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: suppression of free speech and freedom of the press, as much war, as
much of the vilest excess of mutilation, rapine, and delirious
indiscriminate slaughter of helpless non-combatants, old and young, as
much prostitution of professional talent, literary and political, in
defence of manifest wrong, as much cowardly sycophancy giving fine
names to all this villainy or pretending that it is "greatly
exaggerated," as we can find any record of from the days when the
advocacy of liberty was a capital offence and Democracy was hardly
thinkable. Democracy exhibits the vanity of Louis XIV, the savagery
of Peter of Russia, the nepotism and provinciality of Napoleon, the
fickleness of Catherine II: in short, all the childishnesses of all
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