| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs: the outer crust as far back as the Triassic formation,
a gigantic labyrinthodon. And there I was, unarmed, and,
with the exception of a loin cloth, as naked as I had come
into the world. I could imagine how my first ancestor
felt that distant, prehistoric morn that he encountered
for the first time the terrifying progenitor of the thing
that had me cornered now beside the restless, mysterious sea.
Unquestionably he had escaped, or I should not have been
within Pellucidar or elsewhere, and I wished at that moment
that he had handed down to me with the various attributes
that I presumed I have inherited from him, the specific
At the Earth's Core |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: bodies into small pieces (Kepmatizei), and thus naturally produces that
affection which we call heat; and hence the origin of the name (thepmos,
Kepma). Now, the opposite of this is sufficiently manifest; nevertheless
we will not fail to describe it. For the larger particles of moisture
which surround the body, entering in and driving out the lesser, but not
being able to take their places, compress the moist principle in us; and
this from being unequal and disturbed, is forced by them into a state of
rest, which is due to equability and compression. But things which are
contracted contrary to nature are by nature at war, and force themselves
apart; and to this war and convulsion the name of shivering and trembling
is given; and the whole affection and the cause of the affection are both
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: rotting vegetation. It was a beautiful place, but the beauty was the
beauty of death; and all those lines and blots of vapour wrote one great
word across the surface of the country, and that word was 'fever.'
"It was a dreadful year of illness that. I came, I remember, to one
little kraal of Knobnoses, and went up to it to see if I could get some
'maas', or curdled butter-milk, and a few mealies. As I drew near I was
struck with the silence of the place. No children began to chatter, and
no dogs barked. Nor could I see any native sheep or cattle. The place,
though it had evidently been inhabited of late, was as still as the bush
round it, and some guinea-fowl got up out of the prickly pear bushes
right at the kraal gate. I remember that I hesitated a little before
Long Odds |
