| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Shadow out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft: To complete my black confusion, my librarians assured me that,
in view of previous examinations and records of consultation of
the volumes in question, all of these notations must have been
made by myself in my secondary state. This despite the fact that
I was and still am ignorant of three of the languages involved.
Piecing together the scattered records, ancient and modern,
anthropological and medical, I found a fairly consistent mixture
of myth and hallucination whose scope and wildness left me utterly
dazed. Only one thing consoled me, the fact that the myths were
of such early existence. What lost knowledge could have brought
pictures of the Palaeozoic or Mesozoic landscape into these primitive
Shadow out of Time |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Herbert West: Reanimator by H. P. Lovecraft: tests for absolute lifelessness, withdrew satisfied, and finally
injected into the left arm an accurately measured amount of the
vital elixir, prepared during the afternoon with a greater care
than we had used since college days, when our feats were new and
groping. I cannot express the wild, breathless suspense with which
we waited for results on this first really fresh specimen -- the
first we could reasonably expect to open its lips in rational
speech, perhaps to tell of what it had seen beyond the unfathomable
abyss.
West was a materialist, believing in no soul and attributing
all the working of consciousness to bodily phenomena; consequently
Herbert West: Reanimator |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Herland by Charlotte Gilman: "Have you no cattle--sheep--horses?" I drew some rough
outlines of these beasts and showed them to her.
"We had, in the very old days, these," said Somel, and
sketched with swift sure touches a sort of sheep or llama," and
these"--dogs, of two or three kinds, "that that"--pointing to my
absurd but recognizable horse.
"What became of them?" asked Jeff.
"We do not want them anymore. They took up too much room--we need
all our land to feed our people. It is such a little country, you know."
"Whatever do you do without milk?" Terry demanded incredulously.
"MILK? We have milk in abundance--our own."
Herland |
