| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Shadow out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft: massed information and techniques.
Meanwhile the displaced mind,
thrown back to the displacer's age and body, would be carefully
guarded. It would be kept from harming the body it occupied, and
would be drained of all its knowledge by trained questioners.
Often it could be questioned in its own language, when previous
quests into the future had brought back records of that language.
If the mind came from a body whose language the Great Race could
not physically reproduce, clever machines would be made, on which
the alien speech could be played as on a musical instrument.
The
Shadow out of Time |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas: assisted by twenty soldiers of the regiment of Italians in
the king's service, who are in garrison in this town so that
your friends were overpowered by numbers."
"Arrested, were they?" inquired Athos; "is it known why?"
"No, sir, they were carried off instantly, and had not even
time to tell me why; but as soon as they were gone I found
this broken sword-blade, as I was helping to raise two dead
men and five or six wounded ones."
"'Tis still a consolation that they were not wounded," said
Aramis.
"Where were they taken?" asked Athos.
Twenty Years After |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: funniest of the funny. Aware, in fine, that her price for him was
just in her giving him this constant sense of his being admirably
spared, he was careful to remember that she had also a life of her
own, with things that might happen to HER, things that in
friendship one should likewise take account of. Something fairly
remarkable came to pass with him, for that matter, in this
connexion--something represented by a certain passage of his
consciousness, in the suddenest way, from one extreme to the other.
He had thought himself, so long as nobody knew, the most
disinterested person in the world, carrying his concentrated
burden, his perpetual suspense, ever so quietly, holding his tongue
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