| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: moment, as I stand dumbly, fixedly, perplexedly contemplating your
vastness, a menacing cloud, charged with gathering rain, seems to
overshadow my head. What is it that your boundless expanses presage?
Do they not presage that one day there will arise in you ideas as
boundless as yourself? Do they not presage that one day you too will
know no limits? Do they not presage that one day, when again you shall
have room for their exploits, there will spring to life the heroes of
old? How the power of your immensity enfolds me, and reverberates
through all my being with a wild, strange spell, and flashes in my
eyes with an almost supernatural radiance! Yes, a strange, brilliant,
unearthly vista indeed do you disclose, O Russia, country of mine!
Dead Souls |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: eyes, that we saw before us as we loitered over the open moorland,
a far-rolling sea of brown billows, reddened with patches of bell-
heather, and brightened here and there with little lakes lying wide
open to the sky. And were not these peat-cutters, with the big
baskets on their backs, walking in silhouette along the ridges, the
people that Sheila loved and tried to help; and were not these
crofters' cottages with thatched roofs, like beehives, blending
almost imperceptibly with the landscape, the dwellings into which
she planned to introduce the luxury of windows; and were not these
Standing Stones of Callernish, huge tombstones of a vanished
religion, the roofless temple from which the Druids paid their
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: tops. It swung by its heels downward, like an ape, so that its
hands were free for murder; it depended safely by the slightest
twigs; the speed of its coming was incredible; and soon Rua
recognised it for a corpse, horrible with age, its bowels hanging
as it came. Prayer was the weapon of Christian in the Valley of
the Shadow, and it is to prayer that Rua-a-mariterangi attributes
his escape. No merely human expedition had availed.
This demon was plainly from the grave; yet you will observe he was
abroad by day. And inconsistent as it may seem with the hours of
the night watch and the many references to the rising of the
morning star, it is no singular exception. I could never find a
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