| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: two, to wave away with energy the custom of the seated mass of
explanation after the fact, the inserted block of merely
referential narrative, which flourishes so, to the shame of the
modern impatience, on the serried page of Balzac, but which seems
simply to appal our actual, our general weaker, digestion.
"Harking back to make up" took at any rate more doing, as the
phrase is, not only than the reader of to-day demands, but than he
will tolerate at any price any call upon him either to understand
or remotely to measure; and for the beauty of the thing when done
the current editorial mind in particular appears wholly without
sense. It is not, however, primarily for either of these reasons,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells: long day. It was as sweet and fair a view as I have ever seen.
The sun had already gone below the horizon and the west was
flaming gold, touched with some horizontal bars of purple and
crimson. Below was the valley of the Thames, in which the river
lay like a band of burnished steel. I have already spoken of the
great palaces dotted about among the variegated greenery, some in
ruins and some still occupied. Here and there rose a white or
silvery figure in the waste garden of the earth, here and there
came the sharp vertical line of some cupola or obelisk. There
were no hedges, no signs of proprietary rights, no evidences of
agriculture; the whole earth had become a garden.
The Time Machine |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac: his hand; if, unfortunately, the hand touched the iron, he would wake,
no doubt, instantly, and glance at his wife. His sardonic lips, his
pointed chin aggressively pushed forward, presented the characteristic
signs of a malignant spirit, a sagacity coldly cruel, that would
surely enable him to divine all because he suspected everything. His
yellow forehead was wrinkled like those of men whose habit it is to
believe nothing, to weigh all things, and who, like misers chinking
their gold, search out the meaning and the value of human actions. His
bodily frame, though deformed, was bony and solid, and seemed both
vigorous and excitable; in short, you might have thought him a stunted
ogre. Consequently, an inevitable danger awaited the young lady
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