| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft: hypnotised with horror.
In a natural glade of the swamp stood
a grassy island of perhaps an acre's extent, clear of trees and
tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable
horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola
could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying,
bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire;
in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain
of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height;
on top of which, incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the
noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds
Call of Cthulhu |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas: vanquished people, when they hope that a new chief will be
able to save them from ruin and shame.
This new chief, quite ready to appear on the political
stage, and to measure himself against Louis XIV., however
gigantic the fortunes of the Grand Monarch loomed in the
future, was William, Prince of Orange, son of William II.,
and grandson, by his mother Henrietta Stuart, of Charles I.
of England. We have mentioned him before as the person by
whom the people expected to see the office of Stadtholder
restored.
This young man was, in 1672, twenty-two years of age. John
The Black Tulip |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: doctor went on hotly. "If a neurasthenic sleeps in the same room
with you, he rustles his newspaper; when he dines with you, he
gets up a scene with his wife without troubling about your
presence; and when he feels inclined to shoot himself, he shoots
himself in a village in a Zemstvo hut, so as to give the maximum
of trouble to everybody. These gentlemen in every circumstance of
life think of no one but themselves! That's why the elderly so
dislike our 'nervous age.'"
"The elderly dislike so many things," said the examining
magistrate, yawning. "You should point out to the elder
generation what the difference is between the suicides of the
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories |
