| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Agesilaus by Xenophon: But a country pillaged and denuded of inhabitants would not long
support an army. That he felt. A more perennial source of supply was
surely to be found in waving cornfields and thickly clustering
homesteads. So with infinite pains he set himself not merely to crush
his foes by force, but also to win them to his side by gentleness. In
this spirit he often enjoined upon his soldiers to guard their
captives as fellow-men rather than take vengeance upon them as
evildoers;[10] or, on a change of quarters, if aware of little
children left behind by the dealers (since the men often sold them in
the belief that it would be impossible to carry them away and rear
them), he would show concern in behalf of these poor waifs and have
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: of mural decoration. The ultimate blow, of course, was the coming
of the great cold which once held most of the earth in thrall,
and which has never departed from the ill-fated poles - the great
cold that, at the world’s other extremity, put an end to the fabled
lands of Lomar and Hyperborea.
Just when this tendency began
in the antarctic, it would be hard to say in terms of exact years.
Nowadays we set the beginning of the general glacial periods at
a distance of about five hundred thousand years from the present,
but at the poles the terrible scourge must have commenced much
earlier. All quantitative estimates are partly guesswork, but
At the Mountains of Madness |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: "I will tell you in a few words--for this is not romance--it is
history."
We saw no more of Marcas. The administration lasted for three months;
it fell at the end of the session. Then Marcas came back to us, worked
to death. He had sounded the crater of power; he came away from it
with the beginnings of brain fever. The disease made rapid progress;
we nursed him. Juste at once called in the chief physician of the
hospital where he was working as house-surgeon. I was then living
alone in our room, and I was the most attentive attendant; but care
and science alike were in vain. By the month of January, 1838, Marcas
himself felt that he had but a few days to live.
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