| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs:
Indeed, why not? What matter ages in this world of perpetual youth?
We remained at Kadabra, the guests of Talu, until after his
formal induction into office, and then, upon the great fleet which
I had been so fortunate to preserve from destruction, we sailed
south across the ice-barrier; but not before we had witnessed the
total demolition of the grim Guardian of the North under orders of
the new Jeddak of Jeddaks.
"Henceforth," he said, as the work was completed, "the fleets
The Warlord of Mars |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from When the World Shook by H. Rider Haggard: afterwards it came back to me, and I determined to investigate
those stones at the first opportunity.
Passing the wrecks of the machines, we emerged on to the
causeway without accident. After we had rested and washed we set
to work to draw our canoe with its precious burden of food right
into the mouth of the cave, where we hid it as well as we could.
This done we went for a walk round the base of the peak. This
proved to be a great deal larger than we had imagined, over two
miles in circumference indeed. All about it was a belt of fertile
land, as I suppose deposited there by the waters of the great
lake and resulting from the decay of vegetation. Much of this
When the World Shook |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: likeness after death. (3) The appeal of the authority of Homer, who says
that Odysseus saw Minos in his court 'holding a golden sceptre,' which
gives verisimilitude to the tale.
It is scarcely necessary to repeat that Plato is playing 'both sides of the
game,' and that in criticising the characters of Gorgias and Polus, we are
not passing any judgment on historical individuals, but only attempting to
analyze the 'dramatis personae' as they were conceived by him. Neither is
it necessary to enlarge upon the obvious fact that Plato is a dramatic
writer, whose real opinions cannot always be assumed to be those which he
puts into the mouth of Socrates, or any other speaker who appears to have
the best of the argument; or to repeat the observation that he is a poet as
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