| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: from the platform there are far-away lights twinkling in the
evening dusk on both sides of the station -- that is the town.
What town? Yasha does not care to know. He sees only the dim
lights and wretched buildings beyond the station, hears the
cabmen shouting, feels a sharp, cold wind on his face, and
imagines that the town is probably disagreeable, uncomfortable,
and dull.
While they are having tea, when it is quite dark and a lantern is
hanging on the wall again as on the previous evening, the train
quivers from a slight shock and begins moving backwards. After
going a little way it stops; they hear indistinct shouts,
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft: the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At
the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed
on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never
came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss
beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment
of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation
a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet
combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable
huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out
to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat
of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling
Call of Cthulhu |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Myths and Myth-Makers by John Fiske: what has been achieved in that science for several years past.
In spite of all drawbacks, however, his book shows an abiding
taste for scholarly pursuits, and therefore deserves a certain
kind of praise. I hope,--though just now the idea savours of
the ludicrous,--that the day may some time arrive when OUR
Congressmen and Secretaries of the Treasury will spend their
vacations in writing books about Greek antiquities, or in
illustrating the meaning of Homeric phrases.
July, 1870.
VII. THE PRIMEVAL GHOST-WORLD.
NO earnest student of human culture can as yet have forgotten
Myths and Myth-Makers |
