| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy: overwhelmed him, and he longed for death as a field labourer
longs for the shade. It was the pitiful sight of a man
standing in the very focus of sorrow. He continually
bewailed his tardy journey to his mother's house,
because it was an error which could never be rectified,
and insisted that he must have been horribly perverted
by some fiend not to have thought before that it was his
duty to go to her, since she did not come to him. He would
ask Eustacia to agree with him in his self-condemnation;
and when she, seared inwardly by a secret she dared not tell,
declared that she could not give an opinion, he would say,
Return of the Native |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: Singing far off. The dead leaves fall. . . .
'By the clear waters where once I died,
In the calm evening bright with stars,
One among numberless avatars,
I wedded a mortal, a mortal bride,
And lay on the stones and gave my flesh,
And entered the hunger of him I loved.
How shall I ever escape this mesh
Or be from my lover's body removed?'
Dead leaves stream through the hurrying air
And the maenads dance with flying hair.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells: with shining flies, but still warm and with the head torn off.
I stopped aghast at the sight of the scattered blood.
Here at least was one visitor to the island disposed of!
There were no traces of other violence about it. It looked as though it
had been suddenly snatched up and killed; and as I stared at the little
furry body came the difficulty of how the thing had been done.
The vague dread that had been in my mind since I had seen the inhuman
face of the man at the stream grew distincter as I stood there.
I began to realise the hardihood of my expedition among these
unknown people. The thicket about me became altered to my imagination.
Every shadow became something more than a shadow,--became an ambush;
The Island of Doctor Moreau |
