| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: may yet serve both us and the world in good stead. In my case,
ingrained scientific habit may have helped; for above all my bewilderment
and sense of menace, there burned a dominant curiosity to fathom
more of this age-old secret - to know what sort of beings had
built and lived in this incalculably gigantic place, and what
relation to the general world of its time or of other times so
unique a concentration of life could have had.
For this place
could be no ordinary city. It must have formed the primary nucleus
and center of some archaic and unbelievable chapter of earth’s
history whose outward ramifications, recalled only dimly in the
At the Mountains of Madness |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Man of Business by Honore de Balzac: tarnished under glass shades, the small gilt-framed mirror over the
chimney-piece, and in the grate a charred stick or two of firewood
which had lasted them for two winters, as my head-clerk put it. As for
the office, you can guess what it was like--more letter-files than
business letters, a set of common pigeon-holes for either partner, a
cylinder desk, empty as the cash-box, in the middle of the room, and a
couple of armchairs on either side of a coal fire. The carpet on the
floor was bought cheap at second-hand (like the bills and bad debts).
In short, it was the mahogany furniture of furnished apartments which
usually descends from one occupant of chambers to another during fifty
years of service. Now you know the pair of antagonists.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: extinguished, and the incandescent matter concentrated itself,
the lunar crust cooled. By degrees the consequences of these
phenomena showed themselves in the disappearance of organized
beings, and by the disappearance of vegetation. Soon the
atmosphere was rarefied, probably withdrawn by terrestrial
attraction; then aerial departure of respirable air, and
disappearance of water by means of evaporation. At this period
the moon becoming uninhabitable, was no longer inhabited.
It was a dead world, such as we see it to-day."
"And you say that the same fate is in store for the earth?"
"Most probably."
From the Earth to the Moon |
