| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: see heads shortly after they have been struck off still move and bite the
earth, although no longer animated; what changes must take place in the
brain to produce waking, sleep, and dreams; how light, sounds, odors,
tastes, heat, and all the other qualities of external objects impress it
with different ideas by means of the senses; how hunger, thirst, and the
other internal affections can likewise impress upon it divers ideas; what
must be understood by the common sense (sensus communis) in which these
ideas are received, by the memory which retains them, by the fantasy which
can change them in various ways, and out of them compose new ideas, and
which, by the same means, distributing the animal spirits through the
muscles, can cause the members of such a body to move in as many different
Reason Discourse |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: green and gray. Then,--perhaps about half a century ago,--a few
white fishermen cleared a place for themselves in this grove, and
built a few palmetto cottages, with boat-houses and a wharf,
facing the bayou. Later on this temporary fishing station became
a permanent settlement: homes constructed of heavy timber and
plaster mixed with the trailing moss of the oaks and cypresses
took the places of the frail and fragrant huts of palmetto.
Still the population itself retained a floating character: it
ebbed and came, according to season and circumstances, according
to luck or loss in the tilling of the sea. Viosca, the founder
of the settlement, always remained; he always managed to do well.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Nada the Lily by H. Rider Haggard: both of the princes as with one breath, waiting on my words.
"I gave it to both of you, O twin stars of the morning, princes of the
Zulu--in the dream of Chaka I gave it to both of you."
Now the princes looked this way and that, and were silent, not knowing
what to say, for these princes hated each other, though adversity and
fear had brought them to one bed.
"But what avails it to talk thus, ye lords of the land," I went on,
"seeing that, both of you, ye are already as dead men, and that
vultures which are hungry to-night to-morrow shall be filled with meat
of the best? Chaka the king is now a Doctor of Dreams, and to clear
away such a dream as this he has a purging medicine."
Nada the Lily |
