| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft: they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel,
threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether
it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door.
As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong.
One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal,
hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally
variable.
Briden pushed at the stone in several places without
result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately around the edge,
pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably
along the grotesque stone moulding - that is, one would call it
Call of Cthulhu |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Voice of the City by O. Henry: the Claude Melnotte of the lower East Side? What?
It's a 100 to 1 shot that I get the dollar. I wonder
what she went out for. I guess she's gone to tell
Mrs. Muldoon on the second floor, that we're recon-
ciled. I'll remember this. Soft soap! And Ragsy
was talking about slugging her!
Mrs. Peters came back with a bottle of sarsapa-
rilla.
"I'm glad I happened to have that dollar," she
said. "You're all run down, boney."
Mr. Peters had a tablespoonful of the stuff in-
The Voice of the City |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Herodias by Gustave Flaubert: Jews and the Arabs. Herodias had already accused him of cowardice. He
spoke only of the Romans, and complained that Vitellius had not
confided to him any of his military projects. He said he supposed the
proconsul was the friend of Caligula, who often visited Agrippa; and
expressed a surmise that he himself might be exiled, or that perhaps
his throat would be cut.
Herodias, who now treated him with a kind of disdainful indulgence,
tried to reassure him. At last she took from a small casket a curious
medallion, ornamented with a profile of Tiberius. The sight of it, she
said, as she gave it to Antipas, would make the lictors turn pale and
silence all accusing voices.
Herodias |
