| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen: paper, but the mere catalogue of news soon palled upon him, and
Clarke would find himself casting glances of warm desire in the
direction of an old Japanese bureau, which stood at a pleasant
distance from the hearth. Like a boy before a jam-closet, for
a few minutes he would hover indecisive, but lust always
prevailed, and Clarke ended by drawing up his chair, lighting a
candle, and sitting down before the bureau. Its pigeon-holes
and drawers teemed with documents on the most morbid subjects,
and in the well reposed a large manuscript volume, in which he
had painfully entered he gems of his collection. Clarke had a
fine contempt for published literature; the most ghostly story
The Great God Pan |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling: it out all the way from China. I don't know whether that's true or
not, but I know that, if I came first in the evening, I used to
spread my mat just at the foot of it. It was a quiet corner you
see, and a sort of breeze from the gully came in at the window now
and then. Besides the mats, there was no other furniture in the
room--only the coffin, and the old Joss all green and blue and
purple with age and polish.
Fung-Tching never told us why he called the place "The Gate of a
Hundred Sorrows." (He was the only Chinaman I know who used bad-
sounding fancy names. Most of them are flowery. As you'll see in
Calcutta.) We used to find that out for ourselves. Nothing grows
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: disposed on the silvered plate-glass of a mirror.
The first touch of blowing weather would envelop the
whole at once in the spume of the windward breakers,
as if in a sudden cloudlike burst of steam; and the clear
water seemed fairly to boil in all the passages. The
provoked sea outlined exactly in a design of angry foam
the wide base of the group; the submerged level of
broken waste and refuse left over from the building of
the coast near by, projecting its dangerous spurs, all
awash, far into the channel, and bristling with wicked
long spits often a mile long: with deadly spits made of
End of the Tether |
