| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: undeformed by tight shoes and high heels--a lovely foot, as God
intended that feet should be and seldom are. Finding the water to
her liking, the girl swam leisurely to and fro about the pool.
With the silken ease of the seal she swam, now at the surface,
now below, her smooth muscles rolling softly beneath her clear
skin--a wordless song of health and happiness and grace.
Presently she emerged and gave herself into the hands of the
slave girl, who rubbed the body of her mistress with a sweet
smelling semi-liquid substance contained in a golden urn, until
the glowing skin was covered with a foamy lather, then a quick
plunge into the pool, a drying with soft towels, and the bath was
The Chessmen of Mars |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne: his observations. At a quarter to twelve the sun, then seen only
by refraction, looked like a golden disc shedding its last rays upon
this deserted continent and seas which never man had yet ploughed.
Captain Nemo, furnished with a lenticular glass which, by means
of a mirror, corrected the refraction, watched the orb sinking
below the horizon by degrees, following a lengthened diagonal.
I held the chronometer. My heart beat fast. If the disappearance of
the half-disc of the sun coincided with twelve o'clock on the chronometer,
we were at the pole itself.
"Twelve!" I exclaimed.
"The South Pole!" replied Captain Nemo, in a grave voice,
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: in its germ-form of the Cause, as the great inventor sees a glimpse of
the industry latent in his invention, or a science in something that
happens every day unnoticed by ordinary eyes--once allow this, and
there is nothing to cause an outcry in such phenomena, no violent
exception to nature's laws, but the operation of a recognized faculty;
possibly a kind of mental somnambulism, as it were. If, therefore, the
hypothesis upon which the various ways of divining the future are
based seem absurd, the facts remain. Remark that it is not really more
wonderful that the seer should foretell the chief events of the future
than that he should read the past. Past and future, on the sceptic's
system, equally lie beyond the limits of knowledge. If the past has
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