| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic--the manual of
a forgotten church--the Vigiliae Mortuorum Secundum Chorum Ecclesiae
Maguntinae.
I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work,
and of its probable influence upon the hypochondriac, when, one
evening, having informed me abruptly that the lady Madeline was
no more, he stated his intention of preserving her corpse for a
fortnight, (previously to its final interment), in one of the
numerous vaults within the main walls of the building. The
worldly reason, however, assigned for this singular proceeding,
was one which I did not feel at liberty to dispute. The brother
The Fall of the House of Usher |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: body was large, while the lifetime of a Pygmy was but a span,
this friendly intercourse had been going on for innumerable
generations and ages. It was written about in the Pygmy
histories, and talked about in their ancient traditions. The
most venerable and white-bearded Pygmy had never heard of a
time, even in his greatest of grandfathers' days, when the
Giant was not their enormous friend. Once, to be sure (as was
recorded on an obelisk, three feet high, erected on the place
of the catastrophe), Antaeus sat down upon about five thousand
Pygmies, who were assembled at a military review. But this was
one of those unlucky accidents for which nobody is to blame; so
Tanglewood Tales |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy: be.
The child, a little girl with bare legs and long golden curls,
was a being perfectly foreign to him, chiefly because she was
trained quite otherwise than he wished her to be. There sprung up
between the husband and wife the usual misunderstanding, without
even the wish to understand each other, and then a silent
warfare, hidden from outsiders and tempered by decorum. All this
made his life at home a burden, and became even less "the right
thing" than his service and his post.
But it was above all his attitude towards religion which was not
"the right thing." Like every one of his set and his time, by the
Resurrection |
