| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: the pleasure of laying his stepmother in one of those charming little
German cemeteries, in which the Teuton indulges his unbridled passion
for horticulture under the specious pretext of honoring his dead. And
as the second Mme. Brunner expired while the authors of her being were
yet alive, Brunner senior was obliged to bear the loss of the sums of
which his wife had drained his coffers, to say nothing of other ills,
which had told upon a Herculean constitution, till at the age of
sixty-seven the innkeeper had wizened and shrunk as if the famous
Borgia's poison had undermined his system. For ten whole years he had
supported his wife, and now he inherited nothing! The innkeeper was a
second ruin of Heidelberg, repaired continually, it is true, by
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: I. The paradox of the one and many originated in the restless dialectic of
Zeno, who sought to prove the absolute existence of the one by showing the
contradictions that are involved in admitting the existence of the many
(compare Parm.). Zeno illustrated the contradiction by well-known examples
taken from outward objects. But Socrates seems to intimate that the time
had arrived for discarding these hackneyed illustrations; such difficulties
had long been solved by common sense ('solvitur ambulando'); the fact of
the co-existence of opposites was a sufficient answer to them. He will
leave them to Cynics and Eristics; the youth of Athens may discourse of
them to their parents. To no rational man could the circumstance that the
body is one, but has many members, be any longer a stumbling-block.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft: his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously
carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved
anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter
and perspective seemed upset.
The aperture was black with a
darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive
quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought
to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from
its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk
away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous
wings. The odour rising from the newly opened depths was intolerable,
Call of Cthulhu |
