| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: the night before, a tall handsome man, with a head resembling the head
of an intellectual ram. After a few remarks of a general nature
had passed, they were discovering that they knew some of the same people,
as indeed had been obvious from their appearance directly they saw each other.
"Ah yes, old Truefit," said Mr. Elliot. "He has a son at Oxford.
I've often stayed with them. It's a lovely old Jacobean house.
Some exquisite Greuzes--one or two Dutch pictures which the old
boy kept in the cellars. Then there were stacks upon stacks
of prints. Oh, the dirt in that house! He was a miser, you know.
The boy married a daughter of Lord Pinwells. I know them too.
The collecting mania tends to run in families. This chap collects
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lysis by Plato: happy, no one can doubt that they are very ready to promote your happiness.
Certainly, he replied.
And do they then permit you to do what you like, and never rebuke you or
hinder you from doing what you desire?
Yes, indeed, Socrates; there are a great many things which they hinder me
from doing.
What do you mean? I said. Do they want you to be happy, and yet hinder you
from doing what you like? for example, if you want to mount one of your
father's chariots, and take the reins at a race, they will not allow you to
do so--they will prevent you?
Certainly, he said, they will not allow me to do so.
Lysis |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: It probably represented, we concluded, the course of some great
river which in Tertiary times - millions of years ago - had poured
through the city and into some prodigious subterranean abyss of
the great barrier range. Certainly, this was above all a region
of caves, gulfs, and underground secrets beyond human penetration.
Looking back to our sensations, and recalling our dazedness
at viewing this monstrous survival from aeons we had thought prehuman,
I can only wonder that we preserved the semblance of equilibrium,
which we did. Of course, we knew that something - chronology,
scientific theory, or our own consciousness - was woefully awry;
yet we kept enough poise to guide the plane, observe many things
At the Mountains of Madness |
