| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Land of Footprints by Stewart Edward White: acknowledges the fact, but he cannot grasp its human quality. The
affair is interesting, but it is more or less concocted of
pasteboard for his amusement. Thus essential truth asserts its
right.
All this, you must understand, is probably not a deliberate
attempt to deceive. It is merely the recrudescence under the
stimulus of a brand-new environment of the boyish desire to be a
hero. When a man jumps back into the Pleistocene he digs up some
of his ancestors' cave-qualities. Among these is the desire for
personal adornment. His modern development of taste precludes
skewers in the ears and polished wire around the neck; so he
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Last War: A World Set Free by H. G. Wells: has of course laid hold of that. I know that when you say that
the world is set free, you interpret that to mean that the world
is set free for love-making. Down there,--under the clouds, the
lovers foregather. I know your songs, Kahn, your half-mystical
songs, in which you represent this old hard world dissolving into
a luminous haze of love--sexual love.... I don't think you are
right or true in that. You are a young, imaginative man, and you
see life--ardently--with the eyes of youth. But the power that
has brought man into these high places under this blue-veiled
blackness of the sky and which beckons us on towards the immense
and awful future of our race, is riper and deeper and greater
The Last War: A World Set Free |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft: reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald
with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering
of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst;
for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began.
The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the
abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking
mouths protruded limply.
Their arrangement was odd, and seemed
to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth
or the solar system. On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of
pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed to be a rudimentary eye;
The Dunwich Horror |
