| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: fingers had obviously sounded in his ears like celestial harmonies.
A deaf man, seeing the inspired gaze of his blue eyes open on another
world, the rosy glow that tinged his cheeks, and, above all, the
heavenly serenity which ecstasy stamped on his proud and noble
countenance, would have supposed that he was looking on at the
improvisation of a really great artist. The illusion would have been
all the more natural because the performance of this mad music
required immense executive skill to achieve such fingering. Gambara
must have worked at it for years.
Nor were his hands alone employed; his feet were constantly at work
with complicated pedaling; his body swayed to and fro; the
Gambara |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft: presence behind him could be nothing wholesome or mentionable.
His yak must have heard or felt it first, and he did not like
to ask himself whether it had followed him from the haunts of
men or had floundered up out of that black quarry pit. Meanwhile
the cliffs had been left behind, so that the oncoming night fell
over a great waste of sand and spectral rocks wherein all paths
were lost. He could not see the hoofprints of his yak, but always
from behind him there came that detestable clopping; mingled now
and then with what he fancied were titanic flappings and whirrings.
That he was losing ground seemed unhappily clear to him, and he
knew he was hopelessly lost in this broken and blasted desert
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: acquaintances would disappear, his family be broken up, his
wives and houses shared among the elders of the Church, and
his memory only recalled with bated breath and dreadful
headshakings. When I had been very still, and my presence
perhaps was forgotten, some such topic would arise among my
elders by the evening fire; I would see them draw the closer
together and look behind them with scared eyes; and I might
gather from their whisperings how some one, rich, honoured,
healthy, and in the prime of his days, some one, perhaps, who
had taken me on his knees a week before, had in one hour been
spirited from home and family, and vanished like an image
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