| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Lesson of the Master by Henry James: them, who carried on great affairs in the City and made better
bargains than those that poets mostly make with publishers. With
this she hinted at a success more personal - a success peculiarly
stamping the age in which society, the world of conversation, is a
great drawing-room with the City for its antechamber. Overt
numbered her years at first as some thirty, and then ended by
believing that she might approach her fiftieth. But she somehow in
this case juggled away the excess and the difference - you only saw
them in a rare glimpse, like the rabbit in the conjurer's sleeve.
She was extraordinarily white, and her every element and item was
pretty; her eyes, her ears, her hair, her voice, her hands, her
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Herbert West: Reanimator by H. P. Lovecraft: the agony of the damned, for in one inconceivable cacophony was
centered all the supernal terror and unnatural despair of animate
nature. Human it could not have been -- it is not in man to make
such sounds -- and without a thought of our late employment or
its possible discovery, both West and I leaped to the nearest
window like stricken animals; overturning tubes, lamp, and retorts,
and vaulting madly into the starred abyss of the rural night.
I think we screamed ourselves as we stumbled frantically toward
the town, though as we reached the outskirts we put on a semblance
of restraint -- just enough to seem like belated revellers staggering
home from a debauch.
Herbert West: Reanimator |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: Justinian from his throne.
In the midst of these Jacobite and Melchite controversies and riots,
appeared before the city the armies of certain wild and unlettered Arab
tribes. A short and fruitless struggle followed; and, strange to say, a
few months swept away from the face of the earth, not only the wealth,
the commerce, the castles, and the liberty, but the philosophy and the
Christianity of Alexandria; crushed to powder by one fearful blow, all
that had been built up by Alexander and the Ptolemies, by Clement and
the philosophers, and made void, to all appearance, nine hundred years
of human toil. The people, having no real hold on their hereditary
Creed, accepted, by tens of thousands, that of the Mussulman invaders.
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