| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The First Men In The Moon by H. G. Wells: allow for the gravitation. Our muscles are scarcely educated yet. We must
practise a little, when you have got your breath."
I pulled two or three little thorns out of my hand, and sat for a time on
a boulder of rock. My muscles were quivering, and I had that feeling of
personal disillusionment that comes at the first fall to the learner of
cycling on earth.
It suddenly occurred to Cavor that the cold air in the gully, after the
brightness of the sun, might give me a fever. So we clambered back into
the sunlight. We found that beyond a few abrasions I had received no
serious injuries from my tumble, and at Cavor's suggestion we were
presently looking round for some safe and easy landing-place for my next
The First Men In The Moon |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: distinctly coming from the sea, has a thoughtful grace, the
serenity of a fine form above the chaotic disorder of men's houses.
But on the other side, on the flat Essex side, a shapeless and
desolate red edifice, a vast pile of bricks with many windows and a
slate roof more inaccessible than an Alpine slope, towers over the
bend in monstrous ugliness, the tallest, heaviest building for
miles around, a thing like an hotel, like a mansion of flats (all
to let), exiled into these fields out of a street in West
Kensington. Just round the corner, as it were, on a pier defined
with stone blocks and wooden piles, a white mast, slender like a
stalk of straw and crossed by a yard like a knitting-needle, flying
The Mirror of the Sea |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter: a new life. Simplest of all, and most instructive, is the
rite practised by the Kikuyu tribe of British East Africa,
who require that every boy, just before circumcision,
must be born again. The mother stands up with the boy
crouching at her feet; she pretends to go through all the
labour pains, and the boy on being reborn cries like a babe
and is washed."[2]
[1] Ancient Art and Ritual, p. 104.
[2] See also Themis, p. 21.
Let us pause for a moment. An Initiate is of course one
who "enters in." He enters into the Tribe; he enters into
Pagan and Christian Creeds |
