| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Rezanov by Gertrude Atherton: unequal to your divine melancholy. When I can-
not see you I am cross and sulky; and just now--I
am, well--philosophically happy. Some day I shall
be happier, but this is well enough. And I can har-
bor no ugly presentiments. As I entered California
I was elated with a sense of coming happiness, of
future victories; and I prefer to dwell upon that,
the more particularly as in a measure the prophetic
hint has been fulfilled. So make the most of the
present. I shall see you daily during this last
precious fortnight, for I am determined this
Rezanov |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Crito by Plato: according to the opinion of all other men put together?
CRITO: True.
SOCRATES: And if he disobeys and disregards the opinion and approval of
the one, and regards the opinion of the many who have no understanding,
will he not suffer evil?
CRITO: Certainly he will.
SOCRATES: And what will the evil be, whither tending and what affecting,
in the disobedient person?
CRITO: Clearly, affecting the body; that is what is destroyed by the evil.
SOCRATES: Very good; and is not this true, Crito, of other things which we
need not separately enumerate? In questions of just and unjust, fair and
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Herbert West: Reanimator by H. P. Lovecraft: from one test-tube to another, and West was busy over the alcohol
blast-lamp which had to answer for a Bunsen burner in this gasless
edifice, when from the pitch-black room we had left there burst
the most appalling and daemoniac succession of cries that either
of us had ever heard. Not more unutterable could have been the
chaos of hellish sound if the pit itself had opened to release
the agony of the damned, for in one inconceivable cacophony was
centered all the supernal terror and unnatural despair of animate
nature. Human it could not have been -- it is not in man to make
such sounds -- and without a thought of our late employment or
its possible discovery, both West and I leaped to the nearest
Herbert West: Reanimator |
