| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: really what they are. Whether mind be but a sublimated form of
matter, or, what amounts to the same thing, matter a menial kind of
mind, or whether, which seems less likely, it be a something
incomparable with substance, of one thing we are sure, the same laws
of heredity govern both. In each a like chain of continuity leads
from the present to the dim past, a connecting clue which we can
follow backward in imagination. Now what spontaneous variation is
to the material organism, imagination, apparently, is to the mental
one. Just as spontaneous variation is constantly pushing the animal
or the plant to push out, as a vine its tendrils, in all directions,
while natural conditions are as constantly exercising over it a sort
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart: clear. They went out together, and from my window I watched them
get into McKnight's car. It was raining, and at the corner the
Cannonball skidded. Across the street my detective, Johnson,
looked after them with his crooked smile. As he turned up his
collar he saw me, and lifted his hat.
I left the window and sat down in the growing dusk. So the occupant
of lower seven had got on the car at Cresson, probably with Alison
West and her companion. There was some one she cared about enough
to shield. I went irritably to the door and summoned Mrs. Klopton.
"You may throw out those roses," I said without looking at her.
"They are quite dead."
The Man in Lower Ten |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert: their pens. In the open granaries might be seen sacks of spilled
wheat, below the gate was a thick line of chariots which had been
heaped up by the Barbarians, and the peacocks perched in the cedars
were spreading their tails and beginning to utter their cry.
Matho's immobility, however, astonished Spendius; he was even paler
than he had recently been, and he was following something on the
horizon with fixed eyeballs, and with both fists resting on the edge
of the terrace. Spendius crouched down, and so at last discovered at
what he was gazing. In the distance a golden speck was turning in the
dust on the road to Utica; it was the nave of a chariot drawn by two
mules; a slave was running at the end of the pole, and holding them by
Salammbo |
