| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Herbert West: Reanimator by H. P. Lovecraft: both to unconsciousness, and run amuck in a shocking way before
it could be placed behind asylum bars; still another, a loathsome
African monstrosity, had clawed out of its shallow grave and done
a deed -- West had had to shoot that object. We could not get
bodies fresh enough to shew any trace of reason when reanimated,
so had perforce created nameless horrors. It was disturbing to
think that one, perhaps two, of our monsters still lived -- that
thought haunted us shadowingly, till finally West disappeared
under frightful circumstances. But at the time of the scream in
the cellar laboratory of the isolated Bolton cottage, our fears
were subordinate to our anxiety for extremely fresh specimens.
Herbert West: Reanimator |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Nana, Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille by Emile Zola: Fauchery saw the truant schoolboy half lifted from his seat by
passion. Curiosity led him to look at the Count de Vandeuvres--he
was extremely pale, and his lips looked pinched--at fat Steiner,
whose face was purple to the verge of apoplexy; at Labordette,
ogling away with the highly astonished air of a horse dealer
admiring a perfectly shaped mare; at Daguenet, whose ears were
blood-red and twitching with enjoyment. Then a sudden idea made him
glance behind, and he marveled at what he saw in the Muffats' box.
Behind the countess, who was white and serious as usual, the count
was sitting straight upright, with mouth agape and face mottled with
red, while close by him, in the shadow, the restless eyes of the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: enough to have a room to myself. Juste and I shared a double-bedded
room on the fifth floor.
On our side of the landing there were but two rooms--ours and a
smaller one, occupied by Z. Marcas, our neighbor. For six months Juste
and I remained in perfect ignorance of the fact. The old woman who
managed the house had indeed told us that the room was inhabited, but
she had added that we should not be disturbed, that the occupant was
exceedingly quiet. In fact, for those six months, we never met our
fellow-lodger, and we never heard a sound in his room, in spite of the
thinness of the partition that divided us--one of those walls of lath
and plaster which are common in Paris houses.
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