| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: dread--and yet I found it impossible to account for such
feelings. A sensation of stupor oppressed me, as my eyes
followed her retreating steps. When a door, at length, closed
upon her, my glance sought instinctively and eagerly the
countenance of the brother--but he had buried his face in his
hands, and I could only perceive that a far more than ordinary
wanness had overspread the emaciated fingers through which
trickled many passionate tears.
The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill
of her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of
the person, and frequent although transient affections of a
The Fall of the House of Usher |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson: I hastened into Egypt, and, notwithstanding my impatience, was
detained ten months in the contemplation of its ancient
magnificence and in inquiries after the remains of its ancient
learning. I found in Cairo a mixture of all nations: some brought
thither by the love of knowledge, some by the hope of gain; many by
the desire of living after their own manner without observation,
and of lying hid in the obscurity of multitudes; for in a city
populous as Cairo it is possible to obtain at the same time the
gratifications of society and the secrecy of solitude.
"From Cairo I travelled to Suez, and embarked on the Red Sea,
passing along the coast till I arrived at the port from which I had
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: sank deep into the human intelligence. The opposition of the intelligible
and the sensible, and of God to the world, supplied an analogy which
assisted in the separation of soul and body. If ideas were separable from
phenomena, mind was also separable from matter; if the ideas were eternal,
the mind that conceived them was eternal too. As the unity of God was more
distinctly acknowledged, the conception of the human soul became more
developed. The succession, or alternation of life and death, had occurred
to Heracleitus. The Eleatic Parmenides had stumbled upon the modern
thesis, that 'thought and being are the same.' The Eastern belief in
transmigration defined the sense of individuality; and some, like
Empedocles, fancied that the blood which they had shed in another state of
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