| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen: that Number 20 was in very bad odour in Paul Street. The
detectives tried to trace down these rumours to some solid
foundation of fact, but could not get hold of anything. People
shook their heads and raised their eyebrows and thought the
Herberts rather 'queer,' 'would rather not be seen going into
their house,'and so on, but there was nothing tangible. The
authorities were morally certain the man met his death in some
way or another in the house and was thrown out by the kitchen
door, but they couldn't prove it, and the absence of any
indications of violence or poisoning left them helpless. An odd
case, wasn't it? But curiously enough, there's something more
The Great God Pan |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: open to the head of a family to abdicate.
The word abdicate has to our ears a certain regal sound.
We instinctively associate the act with a king. Even the more
democratic expression resign suggests at once an office of public or
quasi public character. To talk of abdicating one's private
relationships sounds absurd; one might as well talk of electing his
parents, it would seem to us. Such misunderstanding of far-eastern
social possibilities comes from our having indulged in digressions
from our more simple nomadic habits. If in imagination we will
return to our ancestral muttons and the then existing order of
things, the idea will not strike us as so strange; for in those
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Death of the Lion by Henry James: Arabian Nights. Thus it was that my informant had encumbered
herself with the ponderous tome; but she hastened to assure me that
this was the first time she had brought it out. For her visit to
Mr. Paraday it had simply been a pretext. She didn't really care a
straw that he should write his name; what she did want was to look
straight into his face.
I demurred a little. "And why do you require to do that?"
"Because I just love him!" Before I could recover from the
agitating effect of this crystal ring my companion had continued:
"Hasn't there ever been any face that you've wanted to look into?"
How could I tell her so soon how much I appreciated the opportunity
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