| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: midnight gale.--It's the unnatural combat of the four primal
elements.--It's a blasted heath.--It's a Hyperborean winter
scene.--It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at
last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in
the picture's midst. THAT once found out, and all the rest were
plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic
fish? even the great leviathan himself?
In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a final theory of my own,
partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with
whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a
Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering
Moby Dick |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates by Howard Pyle: Nicaragua in the darkness of the night, silenced the sentry with
the thrust of a knife, and then fell to pillaging the churches
and houses "without any respect or veneration."
Of course it was but a short time until the whole town was in an
uproar of alarm, and there was nothing left for the little
handful of men to do but to make the best of their way to their
boats. They were in the town but a short time, but in that time
they were able to gather together and to carry away money and
jewels to the value of fifty thousand pieces of eight, besides
dragging off with them a dozen or more notable prisoners, whom
they held for ransom.
Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Door in the Wall, et. al. by H. G. Wells: all the way."
Silence again.
"I have seen those temples," I said abruptly, and indeed he
had brought those still, sunlit arcades of worn sandstone very
vividly before me.
"It was the brown one, the big brown one. I sat down on a
fallen pillar and held her in my arms . . . Silent after the first
babble was over. And after a little while the lizards came out and
ran about again, as though nothing unusual was going on, as though
nothing had changed . . . It was tremendously still there, the sun
high and the shadows still; even the shadows of the weeds upon the
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