| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The First Men In The Moon by H. G. Wells: only the functions and feeling of every organ of the body, but indeed also
the very fabric of the mind, with strange and unanticipated disturbances.
All through the major portion of that vast space journey I hung thinking
of such immaterial things as these, hung dissociated and apathetic, a
cloudy megalomaniac, as it were, amidst the stars and planets in the void
of space; and not only the world to which I was returning, but the
blue-lit caverns of the Selenites, their helmet faces, their gigantic and
wonderful machines, and the fate of Cavor, dragged helpless into that
world, seemed infinitely minute and altogether trivial things to me.
Until at last I began to feel the pull of the earth upon my being, drawing
me back again to the life that is real for men. And then, indeed, it grew
The First Men In The Moon |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: referred to a sunset in Malayan Isles and shaped themselves in my
mind, in a hallucinated vision of forests and rivers and seas,
far removed from a commercial and yet romantic town of the
northern hemisphere. But at that moment the mood of visions and
words was cut short by the third officer, a cheerful and casual
youth, coming in with a bang of the door and the exclamation:
"You've made it jolly warm in here."
It was warm. I had turned on the steam heater after placing a
tin under the leaky water-cock--for perhaps you do not know that
water will leak where steam will not. I am not aware of what my
young friend had been doing on deck all that morning, but the
A Personal Record |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gobseck by Honore de Balzac: "She sat down, drew her son to her knees, and clasped him in her arms,
and held him tightly to her heart.
" 'Ernest, your father said something to you just now.'
" 'Yes, mamma.'
" 'What did he say?'
" 'I cannot repeat it, mamma.'
" 'Oh, my dear child!' cried the Countess, kissing him in rapture.
'You have kept your secret; how glad that makes me! Never tell a lie;
never fail to keep your word--those are two principles which should
never be forgotten.'
" 'Oh! mamma, how beautiful you are! YOU have never told a lie, I am
Gobseck |
