| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Breaking Point by Mary Roberts Rinehart: Like one who enters a room for the first time, to find it already
familiar, for a moment he felt that this thing that he was doing
he had done before. Only for a moment. Then partial memory ceased,
and he climbed into the saddle, rode out and turned toward the
mountains and the cabin. By that strange quality of the brain which
is called habit, although the habit be of only one emphatic
precedent, he followed the route he had taken ten years before.
How closely will never be known. Did he stop at this turn to look
back, as he had once before? Did he let his horse breathe there?
Not the latter, probably, for as, following the blind course that
he had followed ten years before, he left the town and went up the
The Breaking Point |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The People That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs: apparel hid, it quite effectively succeeded in accentuating.
A bit of soft, undressed leather was caught over her left
shoulder and beneath her right breast, falling upon her left
side to her hip and upon the right to a metal band which
encircled her leg above the knee and to which the lowest point
of the hide was attached. About her waist was a loose leather
belt, to the center of which was attached the scabbard
belonging to her knife. There was a single armlet between her
right shoulder and elbow, and a series of them covered her left
forearm from elbow to wrist. These, I learned later, answered
the purpose of a shield against knife attack when the left arm
The People That Time Forgot |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter: the Tribe. They were the expression of things which
would be hard even for us, and which for rude folk would
be impossible, to put into definite words. Hence arose
the expression--whose meaning has been much discussed
by the learned--"to dance out () a mystery."[1]
Lucian, in a much-quoted passage,[2] observes: "You cannot
find a single ancient mystery in which there is not dancing
. . . and this much all men know, that most people say of
the revealers of the mysteries that they 'dance them
out.' " Andrew Lang, commenting on this passage,[3]
continues: "Clement of Alexandria uses the same term when
Pagan and Christian Creeds |
