| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Daughter of Eve by Honore de Balzac: he turned his golden eyes on Schmucke.
The piano, decrepit on its legs, though made of good wood painted
black and gilded, was dirty, defaced, and scratched; and its keys,
worn like the teeth of old horses, were yellowed with the fuliginous
colors of the pipe. On the desk, a little heap of ashes showed that
the night before Schmucke had bestrode the old instrument to some
musical Walhalla. The floor, covered with dried mud, torn papers,
tobacco-dust, fragments indescribable, was like that of a boy's
school-room, unswept for a week, on which a mound of things
accumulate, half rags, half filth.
A more practised eye than that of the countess would have seen certain
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Land that Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs: and dashed at the periscope. I had a vision of wide, distended jaws,
and then all was blotted out. A shiver ran down into the tower as
the thing closed upon the periscope. A moment later it was gone,
and I could see again. Above the trees there soared into my vision
a huge thing on batlike wings--a creature large as a large whale,
but fashioned more after the order of a lizard. Then again
something charged the periscope and blotted out the mirror. I will
confess that I was almost gasping for breath as I gave the commands
to emerge. Into what sort of strange land had fate guided us?
The instant the deck was awash, I opened the conning-tower hatch
and stepped out. In another minute the deck-hatch lifted, and
The Land that Time Forgot |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson: Of gilded helplessness be battered through
By the still crash of salvatory steel.
XIX
To you that sit with Sorrow like chained slaves,
And wonder if the night will ever come,
I would say this: The night will never come,
And sorrow is not always. But my words
Are not enough; your eyes are not enough;
The soul itself must insulate the Real,
Or ever you do cherish in this life --
In this life or in any life -- repose.
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