| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Human Drift by Jack London: Disease, from time to time, will ease the pressure. Diseases are
parasites, and it must not be forgotten that just as there are
drifts in the world of man, so are there drifts in the world of
micro-organisms--hunger-quests for food. Little is known of the
micro-organic world, but that little is appalling; and no census
of it will ever be taken, for there is the true, literal "abysmal
fecundity." Multitudinous as man is, all his totality of
individuals is as nothing in comparison with the inconceivable
vastness of numbers of the micro-organisms. In your body, or in
mine, right now, are swarming more individual entities than there
are human beings in the world to-day. It is to us an invisible
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert: before; he would feel himself more forsaken, more empty, more alone.
Strange words escaped him sometimes, which passed before Salammbo like
broad lightnings illuminating the abysses. This would be at night on
the terrace when, both alone, they gazed upon the stars, and Carthage
spread below under their feet, with the gulf and the open sea dimly
lost in the colour of the darkness.
He would set forth to her the theory of the souls that descend upon
the earth, following the same route as the sun through the signs of
the zodiac. With outstretched arm he showed the gate of human
generation in the Ram, and that of the return to the gods in
Capricorn; and Salammbo strove to see them, for she took these
Salammbo |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac: you; but had you, perchance, fallen upon a hypocrite, a scoffer,
one whose books may be melancholy but whose life is a perpetual
carnival, you would have found as the result of your generous
imprudence an evil-minded man, the frequenter of green-rooms,
perhaps a hero of some gay resort. In the bower of clematis where
you dream of poets, can you smell the odor of the cigar which
drives all poetry from the manuscript?
But let us look still further. How could the dreamy, solitary life
you lead, doubtless by the sea-shore, interest a poet, whose
mission it is to imagine all, and to paint all? What reality can
equal imagination? The young girls of the poets are so ideal that
Modeste Mignon |
