| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft: inbreeding. The average of their intelligence is woefully low,
whilst their annals reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden
murders, incests, and deeds of almost unnameable violence and
perversity. The old gentry, representing the two or three armigerous
families which came from Salem in 1692, have kept somewhat above
the general level of decay; though many branches are sunk into
the sordid populace so deeply that only their names remain as
a key to the origin they disgrace. Some of the Whateleys and Bishops
still send their eldest sons to Harvard and Miskatonic, though
those sons seldom return to the mouldering gambrel roofs under
which they and their ancestors were born.
The Dunwich Horror |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: Ages elapsed from the time the first rough stone was laid as a foundation
till the last spire and pinnacle were shaped, and the hand which laid the
foundation-stone was never the same as that which set the last stone upon
the coping. Generations often succeeded one another, labouring at
gargoyle, rose-window, and shaft, and died, leaving the work to others; the
master-builder who drew up the first rough outline passed away, and was
succeeded by others, and the details of the work as completed bore
sometimes but faint resemblance to the work as he devised it; no man fully
understood all that others had done or were doing, but each laboured in his
place; and the work as completed had unity; it expressed not the desire and
necessity of one mind, but of the human spirit of that age; and not less
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: of that reign, should it ever be revived. At the present moment she is
strictly virtuous from policy, possibly from inclination. Married for
the last seven years to the Marquis de Listomere, one of those
deputies who expect a peerage, she may also consider that such conduct
will promote the ambitions of her family. Some women are reserving
their opinion of her until the moment when Monsieur de Listomere
becomes a peer of France, when she herself will be thirty-six years of
age,--a period of life when most women discover that they are the
dupes of social laws.
The marquis is a rather insignificant man. He stands well at court;
his good qualities are as negative as his defects; the former can no
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