| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: most often merely the result of accumulated repetitions.
History, literary and artistic history especially, being nothing
more than the repetition of identical judgments, which nobody
endeavours to verify, every one ends by repeating what he learnt
at school, till there come to be names and things which nobody
would venture to meddle with. For a modern reader the perusal of
Homer results incontestably in immense boredom; but who would
venture to say so? The Parthenon, in its present state, is a
wretched ruin, utterly destitute of interest, but it is endowed
with such prestige that it does not appear to us as it really is,
but with all its accompaniment of historic memories. The special
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: so that there was some reason for the unfriendly stare which was
bestowed upon Mr. Ambrose's height and upon Mrs. Ambrose's cloak.
But some enchantment had put both man and woman beyond the reach of malice
and unpopularity. In his guess one might guess from the moving lips
that it was thought; and in hers from the eyes fixed stonily straight
in front of her at a level above the eyes of most that it was sorrow.
It was only by scorning all she met that she kept herself from tears,
and the friction of people brushing past her was evidently painful.
After watching the traffic on the Embankment for a minute or two
with a stoical gaze she twitched her husband's sleeve, and they
crossed between the swift discharge of motor cars. When they were
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Beasts of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: weapons as he could fashion from the materials at hand.
Upon the shore he found an out-cropping of brittle, igneous rock.
By dint of much labour he managed to chip off a narrow sliver some
twelve inches long by a quarter of an inch thick. One edge was quite
thin for a few inches near the tip. It was the rudiment of a knife.
With it he went into the jungle, searching until he found a
fallen tree of a certain species of hardwood with which he
was familiar. From this he cut a small straight branch,
which he pointed at one end.
Then he scooped a small, round hole in the surface of the
prostrate trunk. Into this he crumbled a few bits of dry bark,
The Beasts of Tarzan |
