| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Herbert West: Reanimator by H. P. Lovecraft: was too costly for our unauthorised laboratory. Bodies were always
a nuisance -- even the small guinea-pig bodies from the slight
clandestine experiments in West’s room at the boarding-house.
We followed the local death-notices like ghouls, for our specimens
demanded particular qualities. What we wanted were corpses interred
soon after death and without artificial preservation; preferably
free from malforming disease, and certainly with all organs present.
Accident victims were our best hope. Not for many weeks did we
hear of anything suitable; though we talked with morgue and hospital
authorities, ostensibly in the college’s interest, as often as
we could without exciting suspicion. We found that the college
Herbert West: Reanimator |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ion by Plato: of Panopeus, or of Theodorus the Samian, or of any individual sculptor; but
when the works of sculptors in general were produced, was at a loss and
went to sleep and had nothing to say?
ION: No indeed; no more than the other.
SOCRATES: And if I am not mistaken, you never met with any one among
flute-players or harp-players or singers to the harp or rhapsodes who was
able to discourse of Olympus or Thamyras or Orpheus, or Phemius the
rhapsode of Ithaca, but was at a loss when he came to speak of Ion of
Ephesus, and had no notion of his merits or defects?
ION: I cannot deny what you say, Socrates. Nevertheless I am conscious in
my own self, and the world agrees with me in thinking that I do speak
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: on real difficulties. He interprets past ages by his own. The greatest
classical writers are the least appreciated by him. This seems to be the
reason why so many of them have perished, why the lyric poets have almost
wholly disappeared; why, out of the eighty or ninety tragedies of Aeschylus
and Sophocles, only seven of each had been preserved.
Such an age of sciolism and scholasticism may possibly once more get the
better of the literary world. There are those who prophesy that the signs
of such a day are again appearing among us, and that at the end of the
present century no writer of the first class will be still alive. They
think that the Muse of Literature may transfer herself to other countries
less dried up or worn out than our own. They seem to see the withering
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