| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Land that Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs: emptying its water as it rose above the waves, and dropping it
upon the surface of the sea, buoyant and safe.
It did not take me long to clamber over its side and drag Nobs in
to comparative safety, and then I glanced around upon the scene
of death and desolation which surrounded us. The sea was
littered with wreckage among which floated the pitiful forms
of women and children, buoyed up by their useless lifebelts.
Some were torn and mangled; others lay rolling quietly to the
motion of the sea, their countenances composed and peaceful;
others were set in hideous lines of agony or horror. Close to
the boat's side floated the figure of a girl. Her face was
The Land that Time Forgot |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Poems by T. S. Eliot: Now that lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
And twists one in her fingers while she talks.
"Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know
What life is, you should hold it in your hands";
(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)
"You let it flow from you, you let it flow,
And youth is cruel, and has no remorse
And smiles at situations which it cannot see."
I smile, of course,
And go on drinking tea.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: How far the story of Omar's commanding the baths of Alexandria to be
heated with the books from the great library is true, we shall never
know. Some have doubted the story altogether: but so many fresh
corroborations of it are said to have been lately discovered, in Arabic
writers, that I can hardly doubt that it had some foundation in fact.
One cannot but believe that John Philoponus, the last of the Alexandrian
grammarians, when he asked his patron Amrou the gift of the library,
took care to save some, at least, of its treasures; and howsoever
strongly Omar may have felt or said that all books which agreed with the
Koran were useless, and all which disagreed with it only fit to be
destroyed, the general feeling of the Mohammedan leaders was very
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