| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Shadow out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft: of formless life outside of all universes. There were records
of strange orders of beings which had peopled the world in forgotten
pasts, and frightful chronicles of grotesque-bodied intelligences
which would people it millions of years after the death of the
last human being.
I learned of chapters in human history whose
existence no scholar of today has ever suspected. Most of these
writings were in the language of the hieroglyphs; which I studied
in a queer way with the aid of droning machines, and which was
evidently an agglutinative speech with root systems utterly unlike
any found in human languages.
Shadow out of Time |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Georgics by Virgil: Full-fed Tarentum's glades and distant fields,
Or such a plain as luckless Mantua lost
Whose weedy water feeds the snow-white swan:
There nor clear springs nor grass the flocks will fail,
And all the day-long browsing of thy herds
Shall the cool dews of one brief night repair.
Land which the burrowing share shows dark and rich,
With crumbling soil- for this we counterfeit
In ploughing- for corn is goodliest; from no field
More wains thou'lt see wend home with plodding steers;
Or that from which the husbandman in spleen
Georgics |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Droll Stories, V. 1 by Honore de Balzac: beauty. The lady revived at the warmth of this beloved hand,
experiencing such exquisite delights as nearly to make her again
unconscious.
"Alas!" said she, "this sly and superficial caress will be for the
future the only pleasure of our love. It will still be a hundred times
better than the joys which poor Maille fancies he is bestowing on me.
. . . Leave your hand there," said she; "verily it is upon my soul,
and touches it."
At these words the knight was in a pitiful plight, and innocently
confessed to the Lady that he experienced so much pleasure at this
touch that the pains of his malady increased, and that death was
Droll Stories, V. 1 |
