| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: verily, if I had had the boat that I went from Sallee in, I should
have ventured to sea, bound anywhere, I knew not whither. I have
been, in all my circumstances, a memento to those who are touched
with the general plague of mankind, whence, for aught I know, one
half of their miseries flow: I mean that of not being satisfied
with the station wherein God and Nature hath placed them - for, not
to look back upon my primitive condition, and the excellent advice
of my father, the opposition to which was, as I may call it, my
ORIGINAL SIN, my subsequent mistakes of the same kind had been the
means of my coming into this miserable condition; for had that
Providence which so happily seated me at the Brazils as a planter
Robinson Crusoe |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: "Husband! dear husband!" said his wife, in a low voice,--for she
had been looking narrowly at the snow-child, and was more
perplexed than ever,--"there is something very singular in all
this. You will think me foolish,--but--but--may it not be that
some invisible angel has been attracted by the simplicity and
good faith with which our children set about their undertaking?
May he not have spent an hour of his immorttality in playing with
those dear little souls? and so the result is what we call a
miracle. No, no! Do not laugh at me; I see what a foolish thought
it is!"
"My dear wife," replied the husband, laughing heartily, "you are
The Snow Image |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: apes at the time when this region succumbed to the present unbroken
reign of glacial death?
Yet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably
shaken, for this Cyclopean maze of squared, curved, and angled
blocks had features which cut off all comfortable refuge. It was,
very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage in stark, objective,
and ineluctable reality. That damnable portent had had a material
basis after all - there had been some horizontal stratum of ice
dust in the upper air, and this shocking stone survival had projected
its image across the mountains according to the simple laws of
reflection, Of course, the phantom had been twisted and exaggerated,
At the Mountains of Madness |
