| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot: cause great inconvenience? And have you no means of checking frauds
of this kind by commanding your neighbouring subjects to feel
one another?" This of course was a very stupid question,
for feeling could not have answered the purpose; but I asked
with the view of irritating the Monarch, and I succeeded perfectly.
"What!" cried he in horror, "explain your meaning." "Feel, touch,
come into contact," I replied. "If you mean by FEELING,"
said the King, "approaching so close as to leave no space
between two individuals, know, Stranger, that this offence
is punishable in my dominions by death. And the reason is obvious.
The frail form of a Woman, being liable to be shattered
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: ugly things of his far-away youth, when he had too promptly waked
up to a sense of the ugly - these uncanny phenomena placed him
rather, as it happened, under the charm; whereas the "swagger"
things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had
more particularly, like thousands of ingenuous enquirers every
year, come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay. They
were as so many set traps for displeasure, above all for reaction,
of which his restless tread was constantly pressing the spring. It
was interesting, doubtless, the whole show, but it would have been
too disconcerting hadn't a certain finer truth saved the situation.
He had distinctly not, in this steadier light, come over ALL for
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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: likewise undergone a change. It was transformed to the exact
appearance of a common lodging-house bedroom; a bed with
green curtains occupied one corner; and the window was
blocked by the regulation table and mirror. The door of a
small closet here attracted the young man's attention; and
striking a vesta, he opened it and entered. On a table
several wigs and beards were lying spread; about the walls
hung an incongruous display of suits and overcoats; and
conspicuous among the last the young man observed a large
overall of the most costly sealskin. In a flash his mind
reverted to the advertisement in the STANDARD newspaper. The
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