| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: as a "type"; she saw men as samples moving; her dining-room became a
chamber of representatives. It gave a tremendously scientific air
to many of their generalisations, using "scientific" in its
nineteenth-century uncritical Herbert Spencer sense, an air that
only began to disappear when you thought them over again in terms of
actuality and the people one knew. . . .
At the Baileys' one always seemed to be getting one's hands on the
very strings that guided the world. You heard legislation projected
to affect this "type" and that; statistics marched by you with sin
and shame and injustice and misery reduced to quite manageable
percentages, you found men who were to frame or amend bills in grave
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: beauty, and as I thought of it, I almost forgot the clammy sense
of sinister oppression with which the city’s inhuman age and massiveness
and deadness and remoteness and glacial twilight had choked and
weighed on my spirit. Yet according to certain carvings, the denizens
of that city had themselves known the clutch of oppressive terror;
for there was a somber and recurrent type of scene in which the
Old Ones were shown in the act of recoiling affrightedly from
some object - never allowed to appear in the design - found in
the great river and indicated as having been washed down through
waving, vine-draped cycad forests from those horrible westward
mountains.
At the Mountains of Madness |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Idylls of the King by Alfred Tennyson: Thy marriage and mine own, that I should suck
Lies like sweet wines: lie to me: I believe.
Will ye not lie? not swear, as there ye kneel,
And solemnly as when ye sware to him,
The man of men, our King--My God, the power
Was once in vows when men believed the King!
They lied not then, who sware, and through their vows
The King prevailing made his realm:--I say,
Swear to me thou wilt love me even when old,
Gray-haired, and past desire, and in despair.'
Then Tristram, pacing moodily up and down,
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