| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The People That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs: Bowen and I roomed together at college, and I learned a lot
from him outside my regular course. He was a pretty good
scholar despite his love of fun, and his particular hobby
was paleontology. He used to tell me about the various forms
of animal and vegetable life which had covered the globe during
former eras, and so I was pretty well acquainted with the
fishes, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals of paleolithic times.
I knew that the thing that had attacked me was some sort of
pterodactyl which should have been extinct millions of years ago.
It was all that I needed to realize that Bowen had exaggerated
nothing in his manuscript.
The People That Time Forgot |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from 1492 by Mary Johntson: ``Can you not smell cinnamon, spikenard, nutmeg,
cloves and galingal?'' His faith was so strong that we did
smell. From one of these islands, the _Cordera_ lying at
anchor and a boat going ashore, we took a number of pigeons.
So unafraid were these birds that our men approached them
easily and beat them down with a pike. We had them for
supper, and when their crops were opened, the cook found
and brought to the Admiral a number of brown seeds. The
Admiral dropped them into clear water, then smelled and
tasted. ``Cloves? Are they not cloves?'' He gave to Juan
de la Cosa and to me who also tasted and thought they might
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Of The Nature of Things by Lucretius: The desolate space, and germs invisible.
For on whatever side thou deemest first
The primal bodies lacking, lo, that side
Will be for things the very door of death:
Wherethrough the throng of matter all will dash,
Out and abroad.
These points, if thou wilt ponder,
Then, with but paltry trouble led along...
. . . . . .
For one thing after other will grow clear,
Nor shall the blind night rob thee of the road,
Of The Nature of Things |
