| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: came ashore abreast of the Martello tower. By
the afternoon you could see along three miles of
beach dark figures with bare legs dashing in
and out of the tumbling foam, and rough-look-
ing men, women with hard faces, children, mostly
fair-haired, were being carried, stiff and dripping,
on stretchers, on wattles, on ladders, in a long
procession past the door of the 'Ship Inn,' to be
laid out in a row under the north wall of the
Brenzett Church.
"Officially, the body of the little girl in the red
Amy Foster |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: talents by discounting--what? TIME; securing the value of it to their
survivors. I may say that it is no longer a question of economizing
time, but of giving it a price, a quotation; of representing in a
pecuniary sense those products developed by time which presumably you
possess in the region of your intellect; of representing also the
moral qualities with which you are endowed, and which are, Monsieur,
living forces,--as living as a cataract, as a steam-engine of three,
ten, twenty, fifty horse-power. Ha! this is progress! the movement
onward to a better state of things; a movement born of the spirit of
our epoch; a movement essentially progressive, as I shall prove to you
when we come to consider the principles involved in the logical
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: board an apparatus of compressed air very cleverly designed.
There were perfect chambers pierced with scuttles, which, with
water let into certain compartments, could draw it down into
great depths. These apparatuses were at San Francisco, where
they had been used in the construction of a submarine breakwater;
and very fortunately it was so, for there was no time to
construct any. But in spite of the perfection of the machinery,
in spite of the ingenuity of the savants entrusted with the use
of them, the success of the operation was far from being certain.
How great were the chances against them, the projectile being
20,000 feet under the water! And if even it was brought to the
From the Earth to the Moon |
