| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: accumulated experience of ages, had captured him as it had captured
the generations of his forebears.
For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on
shore) have professed to feel for it, for all the celebrations it
had been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been
friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human
restlessness, and playing the part of dangerous abettor of world-
wide ambitions. Faithful to no race after the manner of the kindly
earth, receiving no impress from valour and toil and self-
sacrifice, recognising no finality of dominion, the sea has never
adopted the cause of its masters like those lands where the
The Mirror of the Sea |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: thirty-four thousand feet. The windswept nature of the terrain
clearly disturbed Lake, for it argued the occasional existence
of prodigious gales, violent beyond anything we had so far encountered.
His camp lay a little more than five miles from where the higher
foothills rose abruptly. I could almost trace a note of subconscious
alarm in his words-flashed across a glacial void of seven hundred
miles - as he urged that we all hasten with the matter and get
the strange, new region disposed of as soon as possible. He was
about to rest now, after a continuous day’s work of almost unparalleled
speed, strenuousness, and results.
In the morning I had a three-cornered
At the Mountains of Madness |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: master's colourless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and
jetty eyebrows, deep eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth,--all
energy, decision, will,--were not beautiful, according to rule; but
they were more than beautiful to me; they were full of an interest,
an influence that quite mastered me,--that took my feelings from my
own power and fettered them in his. I had not intended to love him;
the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the
germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of
him, they spontaneously arrived, green and strong! He made me love
him without looking at me.
I compared him with his guests. What was the gallant grace of the
Jane Eyre |
