| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn: wonderfully pellucid style have fitted him for the most delicate of
literary tasks. Hi has seen marvels, and he has told of them in a marvelous
way. There is scarcely an aspect of contemporary Japanese life, scarcely an
element in the social, political, and military questions involved in the
present conflict with Russia which is not made clear in one or another of
the books with which he has charmed American readers.
He characterizes Kwaidan as "stories and studies of strange things." A
hundred thoughts suggested by the book might be written down, but most of
them would begin and end with this fact of strangeness. To read the very
names in the table of contents is like listening to a Buddhist bell, struck
somewhere far away. Some of his tales are of the long ago, and yet they
Kwaidan |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: the praises of the Bandar-log, and whenever a speaker stopped for
want of breath they would all shout together: "This is true; we
all say so." Mowgli nodded and blinked, and said "Yes" when they
asked him a question, and his head spun with the noise. "Tabaqui
the Jackal must have bitten all these people," he said to himself,
"and now they have madness. Certainly this is dewanee, the
madness. Do they never go to sleep? Now there is a cloud coming
to cover that moon. If it were only a big enough cloud I might
try to run away in the darkness. But I am tired."
That same cloud was being watched by two good friends in the
ruined ditch below the city wall, for Bagheera and Kaa, knowing
The Jungle Book |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The First Men In The Moon by H. G. Wells: The snowflakes - the airflakes - danced in about me, as I tried with
chilling hands to thrust the valve in and spun it tight and hard. I
sobbed. "I will," I chattered in my teeth. And then, with fingers that
quivered and felt brittle, I turned to the shutter studs.
As I fumbled with the switches - for I had never controlled them before -
I could see dimly through the steaming glass the blazing red streamers of
the sinking sun, dancing and flickering through the snowstorm, and the
black forms of the scrub thickening and bending and breaking beneath the
accumulating snow. Thicker whirled the snow and thicker, black against
the light. What if even now the switches overcame me? Then something
clicked under my hands, and in an instant that last vision of the moon
The First Men In The Moon |
