| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: as the boat drew but a little nearer, and you beheld the stairs
crowded with abominable deformations of our common manhood, and saw
yourself landing in the midst of such a population as only now and
then surrounds us in the horror of a nightmare - what a haggard eye
you would have rolled over your reluctant shoulder towards the
house on Beretania Street! Had you gone on; had you found every
fourth face a blot upon the landscape; had you visited the hospital
and seen the butt-ends of human beings lying there almost
unrecognisable, but still breathing, still thinking, still
remembering; you would have understood that life in the lazaretto
is an ordeal from which the nerves of a man's spirit shrink, even
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: not desert the old man in his extremity, and, though bleeding
myself, I supported him; I gave him half my strength, and led him
away with me. For three days we journeyed on together, and your
father was sustained beyond my hopes, but, awaking at sunrise on
the fourth day, I found him faint and exhausted; he was unable to
proceed; his life had ebbed away fast; and--"
"He died!" exclaimed Dorcas, faintly.
Reuben felt it impossible to acknowledge that his selfish love of
life had hurried him away before her father's fate was decided.
He spoke not; he only bowed his head; and, between shame and
exhaustion, sank back and hid his face in the pillow. Dorcas wept
Mosses From An Old Manse |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft: the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account
could ever be gained. What the police did extract, came mainly
from the immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have
sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the
cult in the mountains of China.
Old Castro remembered bits of
hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and
made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There
had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They
had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen
had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands
Call of Cthulhu |
