| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: when we enter a parlor or a ball-room, washed, shaven, and
perfumed, with very white linen, in dress coats or in uniform, as
emblems of purity, oh, the disgust! There will surely come a
time, an epoch, when all these lives and all this cowardice will
be unveiled!
"So, nevertheless, I lived, until the age of thirty, without
abandoning for a minute my intention of marrying, and building an
elevated conjugal life; and with this in view I watched all young
girls who might suit me. I was buried in rottenness, and at the
same time I looked for virgins, whose purity was worthy of me!
Many of them were rejected: they did not seem to me pure enough!
The Kreutzer Sonata |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from King Henry VI by William Shakespeare: All these the enemies to our poor bark?
Say you can swim; alas, 't is but a while!
Tread on the sand; why, there you quickly sink;
Bestride the rock; the tide will wash you off,
Or else you famish,--that's a threefold death.
This speak I, lords, to let you understand,
If case some one of you would fly from us,
That there's no hop'd-for mercy with the brothers
More than with ruthless waves, with sands, and rocks.
Why, courage then! what cannot be avoided
'T were childish weakness to lament or fear.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Shadow out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft: its hideous work and sunk into its long decline. By the time of
the posthuman beetle race it would be quite dead. And yet, as
I thought of the native legends, I trembled anew.
It cost me
a terrible effort to vault that yawning chasm, since the littered
floor prevented a running start - but madness drove me on. I chose
a place close to the left-hand wall - where the rift was least
wide and the landing-spot reasonably clear of dangerous debris
- and after one frantic moment reached the other side in safety.
At last, gaining the lower level, I stumbled on past the archway
of the room of machines, within which were fantastic ruins of
Shadow out of Time |
