| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan: little patience. I shall be up tomorrow, if this beastly sea
continues to go down; and then we will try to find somebody suitable
to introduce to you.'
'Thank you, mamma,' said my daughter, without a ray of suspicion.
Then she added consideringly, 'Aunt Emma and Aunt Alice do seem
quite elderly ladies beside you, and yet you are older than either
of them aren't you? I wonder how that is.'
It was so innocent, so admirable, that I laughed at my own expense;
while Cecily, doing her hair, considered me gravely. 'I wish you
would tell me why you laugh, mamma,' quoth she; 'you laugh so
often.'
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from On Horsemanship by Xenophon: Herod. v. 58.
To quote a dictum of Simon, what a horse does under compulsion he does
blindly, and his performance is no more beautiful than would be that
of a ballet-dancer taught by whip and goad. The performances of horse
or man so treated would seem to be displays of clumsy gestures rather
than of grace and beauty. What we need is that the horse should of his
own accord exhibit his finest airs and paces at set signals.[6]
Supposing, when he is in the riding-field,[7] you push him to a gallop
until he is bathed in sweat, and when he begins to prance and show his
airs to fine effect, you promptly dismount and take off the bit, you
may rely upon it he will of his own accord another time break into the
On Horsemanship |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: dimming the torch and mixing with the penguins in the hope of
dodging pursuit. If the fate which screened us was benign, that
which gave us the half glimpse was infinitely the opposite; for
to that flash of semivision can be traced a full half of the horror
which has ever since haunted us.
Our exact motive in looking
back again was perhaps no more than the immemorial instinct of
the pursued to gauge the nature and course of its pursuer; or
perhaps it was an automatic attempt to answer a subconscious question
raised by one of our senses. In the midst of our flight, with
all our faculties centered on the problem of escape, we were in
At the Mountains of Madness |
