| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: for a marriage, from the slated belfry, and proclaim throughout the
neighbourhood that another soul has gone to God.
At night, under the conduct of my kind Irishman, I took my place in
the gallery to hear compline and SALVE REGINA, with which the
Cistercians bring every day to a conclusion. There were none of
those circumstances which strike the Protestant as childish or as
tawdry in the public offices of Rome. A stern simplicity,
heightened by the romance of the surroundings, spoke directly to
the heart. I recall the whitewashed chapel, the hooded figures in
the choir, the lights alternately occluded and revealed, the strong
manly singing, the silence that ensued, the sight of cowled heads
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: own,--a world of vivid brilliancy, so far as color went, and still
unfaded, although the teapot and small cups were as ancient as
the custom itself of tea-drinking.
"Your great-great-great-great-grandmother had these cups, when
she was married," said Hepzibah to Phoebe."She was a
Davenport, of a good family. They were almost the first teacups
ever seen in the colony; and if one of them were to be broken,
my heart would break with it. But it is Nonsense to speak so
about a brittle teacup, when I remember what my heart has gone
through without breaking."
The cups--not having been used, perhaps, since Hepzibah's
House of Seven Gables |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft: when the thud of something on the newly heaped bones nearby drew
his notice from the other sound. It was the ladder, and after
a minute of groping he had it taut in his hands. But the other
sound did not cease, and followed him even as he climbed. He had
gone fully five feet from the ground when the rattling beneath
waxed emphatic, and was a good ten feet up when something swayed
the ladder from below. At a height which must have been fifteen
or twenty feet he felt his whole side brushed by a great slippery
length which grew alternately convex and concave with wriggling;
and hereafter he climbed desperately to escape the unendurable
nuzzling of that loathsome and overfed Dhole whose form no man
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath |
