| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: in the country of the enemy, and, too, there was always
the menace of the great white apes, which, John Carter
was wont to say, are the only creatures that can arouse
in the breasts of these fierce denizens of the dead
sea-bottoms even the remotest semblance of fear.
As the rider neared the plaza, he reined suddenly in.
His slender, tubular ears pointed rigidly forward.
An unwonted sound had reached them. Voices! And where
there were voices, outside of Torquas, there, too,
were enemies. All the world of wide Barsoom contained
naught but enemies for the fierce Torquasians.
Thuvia, Maid of Mars |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: the theatre, without the metaphysical or allegorical
complications of The Ring. Indeed, the ultimate catastrophe of
the Saga cannot by any perversion of ingenuity be adapted to the
perfectly clear allegorical design of The Rhine Gold, The
Valkyries, and Siegfried.
SIEGFRIED AS PROTESTANT
The philosophically fertile element in the original project of
Siegfried's Death was the conception of Siegfried himself as a
type of the healthy man raised to perfect confidence in his own
impulses by an intense and joyous vitality which is above fear,
sickliness of conscience, malice, and the makeshifts and moral
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Lesson of the Master by Henry James: fulness of his notes. Something within him warned him that he must
make it supremely good - otherwise he should lack, as regards his
private behaviour, a handsome excuse. He had a horror of this
deficiency and found himself as firm as need be on the question of
the lamp and the file. He crossed the Alps at last and spent the
winter, the spring, the ensuing summer, in Italy, where still, at
the end of a twelvemonth, his task was unachieved. "Stick to it -
see it through": this general injunction of St. George's was good
also for the particular case. He applied it to the utmost, with
the result that when in its slow order the summer had come round
again he felt he had given all that was in him. This time he put
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