| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Outlaw of Torn by Edgar Rice Burroughs: articles of clothing he pushed off from the bank, and,
rowing close to the shore, hastened down the Thames
toward the old dock where, the previous night, he had
concealed his skiff. He reached his destination unno-
ticed, and, running in beneath the dock, worked the
boat far into the dark recess of the cave-like retreat.
Here he determined to hide until darkness had fallen,
for he knew that the search would be on for the little
lost Prince at any moment, and that none might traverse
the streets of London without being subject to the closest
scrutiny.
The Outlaw of Torn |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ferragus by Honore de Balzac: to burn his wife after the manner of the Romans. The clubs of Paris
took up the subject, and talked for a while of the burials of
antiquity. Ancient things were just then becoming a fashion, and some
persons declared that it would be a fine thing to re-establish, for
distinguished persons, the funeral pyre. This opinion had its
defenders and its detractors. Some said that there were too many such
personages, and the price of wood would be enormously increased by
such a custom; moreover, it would be absurd to see our ancestors in
their urns in the procession at Longchamps. And if the urns were
valuable, they were likely some day to be sold at auction, full of
respectable ashes, or seized by creditors,--a race of men who
Ferragus |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Shadow out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft: rightful sequence. I have, for example, a very imperfect idea
of my own living arrangements in the dream-world; though I seem
to have possessed a great stone room of my own. My restrictions
as a prisoner gradually disappeared, so that some of the visions
included vivid travels over the mighty jungle roads, sojourns
in strange cities, and explorations of some of the vast, dark,
windowless ruins from which the Great Race shrank in curious fear.
There were also long sea voyages in enormous, many-decked boats
of incredible swiftness, and trips over wild regions in closed
projectile-like airships lifted and moved by electrical repulsion.
Beyond the wide, warm ocean were other cities of the Great Race,
Shadow out of Time |
