| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Land that Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs: find Lys, I stumbled upon another grave--the grave of William James,
with its little crude headstone and its scrawled characters
recording that he had died upon the 13th of September--killed by
a saber-tooth tiger.
I think that I almost gave up then. Never in my life have I felt
more hopeless or helpless or alone. I was lost. I could not
find my friends. I did not even know that they still lived; in
fact, I could not bring myself to believe that they did. I was
sure that Lys was dead. I wanted myself to die, and yet I clung
to life--useless and hopeless and harrowing a thing as it had become.
I clung to life because some ancient, reptilian forbear had clung
The Land that Time Forgot |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The King of the Golden River by John Ruskin: momentous visit above related, he entered the Treasure Valley no
more; and, what was worse, he had so much influence with his
relations, the West Winds in general, and used it so effectually,
that they all adopted a similar line of conduct. So no rain fell
in the valley from one year's end to another. Though everything
remained green and flourishing in the plains below, the inheritance
of the three brothers was a desert. What had once been the richest
soil in the kingdom became a shifting heap of red sand, and the
brothers, unable longer to contend with the adverse skies, abandoned
their valueless patrimony in despair, to seek some means of gaining
a livelihood among the cities and people of the plains. All their
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Enemies of Books by William Blades: only place on record some of the cruelties perpetrated upon books
by the ignorance or carelessness of binders.
Like men, books have a soul and body. With the soul, or literary portion,
we have nothing to do at present; the body, which is the outer
frame or covering, and without which the inner would be unusable,
is the special work of the binder. He, so to speak, begets it;
he determines its form and adornment, he doctors it in disease
and decay, and, not unseldom, dissects it after death.
Here, too, as through all Nature, we find the good and bad running
side by side. What a treat it is to handle a well-bound volume;
the leaves lie open fully and freely, as if tempting you to read on,
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