| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald: brought in a great funeral wreath of fresh flowers, how the smell
of it had suddenly cleared the air and given every one in the car
a momentary glow.
"I detest poor people," thought Amory suddenly. "I hate them for
being poor. Poverty may have been beautiful once, but it's rotten
now. It's the ugliest thing in the world. It's essentially
cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and
poor." He seemed to see again a figure whose significance had
once impressed hima well-dressed young man gazing from a club
window on Fifth Avenue and saying something to his companion with
a look of utter disgust. Probably, thought Amory, what he said
This Side of Paradise |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: of separate Cyclopean blocks which Lake had attributed to his
flight-companion Carroll. How to account for such things in this
place was frankly beyond me, and I felt queerly humbled as a geologist.
Igneous formations often have strange regularities - like the
famous Giants’ Causeway in Ireland - but this stupendous range,
despite Lake’s original suspicion of smoking cones, was above
all else nonvolcanic in evident structure.
The curious cave
mouths, near which the odd formations seemed most abundant, presented
another albeit a lesser puzzle because of their regularity of
outline. They were, as Lake’s bulletin had said, often approximately
At the Mountains of Madness |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Golden Threshold by Sarojini Naidu: everybody else superficially. Every one thinks I am so nice and
cheerful, so 'brave,' all the banal things that are so
comfortable to be. My mother knows me only as 'such a tranquil
child, but so strong-willed.' A tranquil child!" And she writes
again, with deeper significance: "I too have learnt the subtle
philosophy of living from moment to moment. Yes, it is a subtle
philosophy, though it appears merely an epicurean doctrine:
'Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.' I have gone
through so many yesterdays when I strove with Death that I have
realised to its full the wisdom of that sentence; and it is to me
not merely a figure of speech, but a literal fact. Any to-morrow
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