| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy: truth that shone within him.
'In how far is what I do for God and in how far is it for men?'
That was the question that insistently tormented him and to which
he was not so much unable to give himself an answer as unable to
face the answer.
In the depth of his soul he felt that the devil had substituted
an activity for men in place of his former activity for God. He
felt this because, just as it had formerly been hard for him to
be torn from his solitude so now that solitude itself was hard
for him. He was oppressed and wearied by visitors, but at the
bottom of his heart he was glad of their presence and glad of the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: 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.
The man whose soul and brain he had been for six months never even
sent to inquire after him. Marcas expressed the greatest contempt for
the Government; he seemed to doubt what the fate of France might be,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: mathematical tradition of the Old Ones, yet seemingly more like
a parody than a perpetuation of that tradition. We could not get
it out of our minds that some subtly but profoundly alien element
had been added to the aesthetic feeling behind the technique -
an alien element, Danforth guessed, that was responsible for the
laborious substitution. It was like, yet disturbingly unlike,
what we had come to recognize as the Old Ones’ art; and I was
persistently reminded of such hybrid things as the ungainly Palmyrene
sculptures fashioned in the Roman manner. That others had recently
noticed this belt of carving was hinted by the presence of a used
flashlight battery on the floor in front of one of the most characteristic
At the Mountains of Madness |
