| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Of The Nature of Things by Lucretius: While idol-films decline to- for they're rent,
Unless along straight apertures they swim,
Like those in glass, through which all images
Do fly across. And yet this voice itself,
In passing through shut chambers of a house,
Is dulled, and in a jumble enters ears,
And sound we seem to hear far more than words.
Moreover, a voice is into all directions
Divided up, since off from one another
New voices are engendered, when one voice
Hath once leapt forth, outstarting into many-
Of The Nature of Things |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert: Hamilcar, in a red cloak, like the priests of Moloch, was beside the
Baal, standing upright in front of the great toe of its right foot.
When the fourteenth child was brought every one could see him make a
great gesture of horror. But he soon resumed his former attitude,
folded his arms, and looked upon the ground. The high pontiff stood on
the other side of the statue as motionless as he. His head, laden with
an Assyrian mitre, was bent, and he was watching the gold plate on his
breast; it was covered with fatidical stones, and the flame mirrored
in it formed irisated lights. He grew pale and dismayed. Hamilcar bent
his brow; and they were both so near the funeral-pile that the hems of
their cloaks brushed it as they rose from time to time.
Salammbo |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy: referring to his getting the peasant warm with the same
boastfulness with which he spoke of his buying and selling.
Vasili Andreevich lay in that way for one hour, another, and a
third, but he was unconscious of the passage of time. At first
impressions of the snow-storm, the sledge-shafts, and the horse
with the shaft-bow shaking before his eyes, kept passing
through his mind, then he remembered Nikita lying under him,
then recollections of the festival, his wife, the
police-officer, and the box of candles, began to mingle with
these; then again Nikita, this time lying under that box, then
the peasants, customers and traders, and the white walls of his
Master and Man |
