| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: counted, have existed, was to turn on the new light, to utter - oh,
so quietly! - the unimagined truth. It was in other words to trace
the figure in the carpet through every convolution, to reproduce it
in every tint. The result, according to my friend, would be the
greatest literary portrait ever painted, and what he asked of me
was just to be so good as not to trouble him with questions till he
should hang up his masterpiece before me. He did me the honour to
declare that, putting aside the great sitter himself, all aloft in
his indifference, I was individually the connoisseur he was most
working for. I was therefore to be a good boy and not try to peep
under the curtain before the show was ready: I should enjoy it all
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Herbert West: Reanimator by H. P. Lovecraft: reptile. Two biological points he was exceedingly anxious to settle
-- first, whether any amount of consciousness and rational action
be possible without the brain, proceeding from the spinal cord
and various nerve-centres; and second, whether any kind of ethereal,
intangible relation distinct from the material cells may exist
to link the surgically separated parts of what has previously
been a single living organism. All this research work required
a prodigious supply of freshly slaughtered human flesh -- and
that was why Herbert West had entered the Great War.
The phantasmal,
unmentionable thing occurred one midnight late in March, 1915,
Herbert West: Reanimator |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: as much as three hundred miles in a day and a night. He met with
more adventures than can be told, and narrowly escaped being
caught by the Basking Shark, and the Spotted Shark, and the
Hammerhead, and he met all the untrustworthy ruffians that loaf up
and down the seas, and the heavy polite fish, and the scarlet
spotted scallops that are moored in one place for hundreds of
years, and grow very proud of it; but he never met Sea Cow, and he
never found an island that he could fancy.
If the beach was good and hard, with a slope behind it for
seals to play on, there was always the smoke of a whaler on the
horizon, boiling down blubber, and Kotick knew what that meant.
The Jungle Book |
