| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Last War: A World Set Free by H. G. Wells: for weight of the atomic engine, it was at last possible to add
Redmayne's ingenious helicopter ascent and descent engine to the
vertical propeller that had hitherto been the sole driving force
of the aeroplane without overweighting the machine, and men found
themselves possessed of an instrument of flight that could hover
or ascend or descend vertically and gently as well as rush wildly
through the air. The last dread of flying vanished. As the
journalists of the time phrased it, this was the epoch of the
Leap into the Air. The new atomic aeroplane became indeed a
mania; every one of means was frantic to possess a thing so
controllable, so secure and so free from the dust and danger of
The Last War: A World Set Free |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine and Mucedorus by William Shakespeare: in that sort. Dash out my brains? O horrible!
terrible! I think I have a quarry of stones in my
pocket.
[Let him make as though he would give him some,
and as he putteth out his hand, enter the ghost of
Albanact, and strike him on the hand: and so
Strumbo runs out, Humber following him. Exit.]
ALBANACT'S GHOST.
Lo, here the gift of fell ambition,
Of usurpation and of treachery!
Lo, here the harms that wait upon all those
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: creative genius, to the realm of universal but levelling might;
equalizing all products, spreading them broadcast among the masses,
and being itself controlled by the principle of unity,--the final
expression of all societies. Do we not find the dead level of
barbarism succeeding the saturnalia of popular thought and the last
struggles of those civilizations which accumulated the treasures of
the world in one direction?
The commercial traveller! Is he not to the realm of ideas what our
stage-coaches are to men and things? He is their vehicle; he sets them
going, carries them along, rubs them up with one another. He takes
from the luminous centre a handful of light, and scatters it broadcast
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