| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: sleeping upon the deck, but always before him the
strange panthan whom he had recruited that same day
found means for keeping himself to the fore.
Vas Kor turned to his lieutenant, giving instruction
for the bringing of the Kalksus to Dusar, and the
gathering up of the recruits; then he signed to two
warriors who stood close behind the padwar.
"You two accompany us to the Thuria," he said, "and
put yourselves at the disposal of her dwar."
It was dark upon the deck of the Kalksus, so Vas Kor
had not a good look at the faces of the two he chose;
Thuvia, Maid of Mars |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Psychology of Revolution by Gustave le Bon: risings were taking place daily, the prospect of the guillotine
no longer terrified men. Things happened as though the Terror
terrorised no one. Terror is an efficacious psychological
process so long as it does not last. The real terror resides far
more in threats than in their realisation.
3. The Terror in the Provinces.
The executions of the Revolutionary Tribunals in the provinces
represented only a portion of the massacres effected in the
departments during the Terror. The revolutionary army, composed
of vagabonds and brigands, marched through France killing and
pillaging. Its method of procedure is well indicated by the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present:
it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still
quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and
the tinglings of a merited shame.
Into this second life Bulstrode's past had now risen, only the
pleasures of it seeming to have lost their quality. Night and day,
without interruption save of brief sleep which only wove retrospect
and fear into a fantastic present, he felt the scenes of his earlier
life coming between him and everything else, as obstinately as when we
look through the window from a lighted room, the objects we turn
our backs on are still before us, instead of the grass and the trees
Middlemarch |
