| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Shadow out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft: I tried all sorts of psychological
expedients to get these notions out of my head, but met with no
success. Sleeplessness also gained upon me, but I almost welcomed
this because of the resultant shortening of my dream-periods.
I acquired the habit of taking long, lone walks in the desert
late at night-usually to the north or northeast, whither the sum
of my strange new impulses seemed subtly to pull me.
Sometimes,
on these walks, I would stumble over nearly buried fragments of
the ancient masonry. Though there were fewer visible blocks here
than where we had started, I felt sure that there must be a vast
Shadow out of Time |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: ineffectual changes in the policy of his papers, and a haunting
pursuit by parallel columns in the liberal press that never abashed
him in the slightest degree. By an accident I plumbed the folly in
him--but I feel I never plumbed his wisdom. I remember him one day
after a lunch at the Barhams' saying suddenly, out of profound
meditation over the end of a cigar, one of those sentences that seem
to light the whole interior being of a man. "Some day," he said
softly, rather to himself than to me, and A PROPOS of nothing--"some
day I will raise the country."
"Why not?" I said, after a pause, and leant across him for the
little silver spirit-lamp, to light my cigarette. . . .
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: he appears to be experimenting on the different points of view from which a
subject of philosophy may be regarded, he is secretly elaborating a system.
By such a use of language any premises may be made to lead to any
conclusion. I am not one of those who believe Plato to have been a mystic
or to have had hidden meanings; nor do I agree with Dr. Jackson in thinking
that 'when he is precise and dogmatic, he generally contrives to introduce
an element of obscurity into the expostion' (J. of Philol.). The great
master of language wrote as clearly as he could in an age when the minds of
men were clouded by controversy, and philosophical terms had not yet
acquired a fixed meaning. I have just said that Plato is to be interpreted
by his context; and I do not deny that in some passages, especially in the
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