| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: There where the roof had fallen, it roared like the mouth of hell.
Thither Rahero went, stumbling on senseless folk,
And grappled a post of the house, and began to climb in the smoke:
The last alive of Vaiau; and the son borne by the sire.
The post glowed in the grain with ulcers of eating fire,
And the fire bit to the blood and mangled his hands and thighs;
And the fumes sang in his head like wine and stung in his eyes;
And still he climbed, and came to the top, the place of proof,
And thrust a hand through the flame, and clambered alive on the roof.
But even as he did so, the wind, in a garment of flames and pain,
Wrapped him from head to heel; and the waistcloth parted in twain;
Ballads |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: this volume. Not that it suffices to study the Principles of Geology, or
to read special treatises by different observers on separate formations,
and to mark how each author attempts to give an inadequate idea of the
duration of each formation or even each stratum. A man must for years
examine for himself great piles of superimposed strata, and watch the sea
at work grinding down old rocks and making fresh sediment, before he can
hope to comprehend anything of the lapse of time, the monuments of which we
see around us.
It is good to wander along lines of sea-coast, when formed of moderately
hard rocks, and mark the process of degradation. The tides in most cases
reach the cliffs only for a short time twice a day, and the waves eat into
On the Origin of Species |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen: London teem in every quarter and every hour. Villiers prided
himself as a practised explorer of such obscure mazes and byways
of London life, and in this unprofitable pursuit he displayed an
assiduity which was worthy of more serious employment. Thus he
stood by the lamp-post surveying the passers-by with
undisguised curiosity, and with that gravity known only to the
systematic diner, had just enunciated in his mind the formula:
"London has been called the city of encounters; it is more than
that, it is the city of Resurrections," when these reflections
were suddenly interrupted by a piteous whine at his elbow, and
a deplorable appeal for alms. He looked around in some
The Great God Pan |
