| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne: this dense and heavy atmosphere? There are sufficient fish for their
support. I survey the whole space that stretches overhead; it is as
desert as the shore was.
Still my imagination carried me away amongst the wonderful
speculations of palaeontology. Though awake I fell into a dream. I
thought I could see floating on the surface of the waters enormous
chelonia, preadamite tortoises, resembling floating islands. Over the
dimly lighted strand there trod the huge mammals of the first ages of
the world, the leptotherium (slender beast), found in the caverns of
Brazil; the merycotherium (ruminating beast), found in the 'drift' of
iceclad Siberia. Farther on, the pachydermatous lophiodon (crested
Journey to the Center of the Earth |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mountains by Stewart Edward White: not impress you particularly except as a very fine
tree. Its proportions are so perfect that its effect is
rather to belittle its neighbors than to show in its true
magnitude. Then, gradually, as your experience
takes cognizance of surroundings,--the size of a
sugar-pine, of a boulder, of a stream flowing near,--
the giant swells and swells before your very vision
until he seems at the last even greater than the mere
statistics of his inches had led you to believe. And
after that first surprise over finding the Sequoia
something not monstrous but beautiful in proportion has
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter: dogmatically the following note:--"Such a drama, if we are right,
was the original story of Esther and Mordecai, or (to give their
older names) Ishtar and Marduk. It was played in Babylonia, and
from Babylonia the returning Captives brought it to Judaea, where
it was acted, rather as an historical than a mythical piece, by
players who, having to die in grim earnest on a cross or gallows,
were naturally drawn from the gaol rather than the green-room. A
chain of causes, which because we cannot follow them might--in
the loose language of common life--be called an accident,
determined that the part of the dying god in this annual play
should be thrust upon Jesus of Nazareth, whom the enemies he had
Pagan and Christian Creeds |
