| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from When the World Shook by H. Rider Haggard: bordered by houses, though these, I observed, were roofless, very
fine houses, some of them, built of white stone or marble. There
were roadways and pavements worn by the passage of feet. There,
farther on, were market-places or public squares, and there,
lastly, was a huge central enclosure one or two hundred acres in
extent, which was filled with majestic buildings that looked like
palaces, or town-halls; and, in the midst of them all, a vast
temple with courts and a central dome. For here, notwithstanding
the lack of necessity, its builders seemed to have adhered to the
Over-world tradition, and had roofed their fane.
And now came the terror. All of this enormous city was dead.
When the World Shook |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Shadow out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft: Florentine monk named Bartolomeo Corsi; with that of a king of
Lomar who had ruled that terrible polar land one hundred thousand
years before the squat, yellow Inutos came from the west to engulf
it.
I talked with the mind of Nug-Soth, a magician of the dark
conquerors of 16,000 A.D.; with that of a Roman named Titus Sempronius
Blaesus, who had been a quaestor in Sulla's time; with that of
Khephnes, an Egyptian of the 14th Dynasty, who told me the hideous
secret of Nyarlathotep, with that of a priest of Atlantis' middle
kingdom; with that of a Suffolk gentleman of Cromwell's day, James
Woodville; with that of a court astronomer of pre-Inca Peru; with
Shadow out of Time |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: and condemns, and still spurs up to further effort and new failure.
Thus it is that she sets us blushing at our ignorant and tepid
works; and the more we find of these inspiring shocks the less
shall we be apt to love the literal in our productions. In all
sciences and senses the letter kills; and to-day, when cackling
human geese express their ignorant condemnation of all studio
pictures, it is a lesson most useful to be learnt. Let the young
painter go to Fontainebleau, and while he stupefies himself with
studies that teach him the mechanical side of his trade, let him
walk in the great air, and be a servant of mirth, and not pick and
botanise, but wait upon the moods of nature. So he will learn - or
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