| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Myths and Myth-Makers by John Fiske: a moment to examine the wild superstitions about
"changelings," which contributed, along with so many others,
to make the lives of our ancestors anxious and miserable.
These superstitions were for the most part attempts to explain
the phenomena of insanity, epilepsy, and other obscure nervous
diseases. A man who has hitherto enjoyed perfect health, and
whose actions have been consistent and rational, suddenly
loses all self-control and seems actuated by a will foreign to
himself. Modern science possesses the key to this phenomenon;
but in former times it was explicable only on the hypothesis
that a demon had entered the body of the lunatic, or else that
Myths and Myth-Makers |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from When the World Shook by H. Rider Haggard: Next he took a filament of cotton wool and laid it on the man's
lips. Presently it moved; he was breathing, though very faintly.
Bickley took more cotton wool and having poured something from
his medicine-chest on to it, placed it over the mouth beneath the
man's nostrils--I believe it was sal volatile.
Nothing further happened for a little while, and to relieve the
strain on my mind I stared absently into the empty coffin. Here I
saw what had escaped our notice, two small plates of white metal
and cut upon them what I took to be star maps. Beyond these and
the glowing boxes which I have mentioned, there was nothing else
in the coffin. I had no time to examine them, for at that moment
When the World Shook |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: "Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you what
I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?"
"Very much."
"It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about--things. Well, she was less
than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether
with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it
was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head
away and wept. 'all right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope
she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world,
a beautiful little fool."
"You see I think everything's terrible anyhow," she went on in a
The Great Gatsby |
