| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart: "To whom?" I asked eagerly.
"I reckon I've forgot the name, but the message was that this fellow
- Sullivan was his name - was at M-, and if the man had escaped
from the wreck would he come to see him."
"He wouldn't have sent that message to me," I said to McKnight,
rather crestfallen. "He'd have every object in keeping out of my
way."
"There might be reasons," McKnight observed judicially. "He might
not have found the papers then."
"Was the name Blakeley?" I asked.
"It might have been - I can't say. But the man wasn't there, and
The Man in Lower Ten |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Christ in Flanders by Honore de Balzac: The Convent of Mercy was built for sailors on this spot, where for
long afterwards (so it was said) the footprints of Jesus Christ could
be seen in the sand; but in 1793, at the time of the French invasion,
the monks carried away this precious relic, that bore witness to the
Saviour's last visit to earth.
There at the convent I found myself shortly after the Revolution of
1830. I was weary of life. If you had asked me the reason of my
despair, I should have found it almost impossible to give it, so
languid had grown the soul that was melted within me. The west wind
had slackened the springs of my intelligence. A cold gray light poured
down from the heavens, and the murky clouds that passed overhead gave
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: inflicting horrible tortures on his son remained unperceived
during many centuries. Such potent geniuses as a Galileo, a
Newton, and a Leibnitz never supposed for an instant that the
truth of such dogmas could be called in question. Nothing can be
more typical than this fact of the hypnotising effect of general
beliefs, but at the same time nothing can mark more decisively
the humiliating limitations of our intelligence.
[21] Barbarous, philosophically speaking, I mean. In practice
they have created an entirely new civilisation, and for fifteen
centuries have given mankind a glimpse of those enchanted realms
of generous dreams and of hope which he will know no more.
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