| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: attendants squat by the house door, awaiting his least signal. In
the boat, which has been suffered to drop astern, one or two of his
wives lie covered from the sun under mats, tossed by the short sea
of the lagoon, and enduring agonies of heat and tedium. This
severity is now and then relaxed and the wives allowed on board.
Three or four were thus favoured on the day of our arrival:
substantial ladies airily attired in RIDIS. Each had a share of
copra, her PECULIUM, to dispose of for herself. The display in the
trade-room - hats, ribbbons, dresses, scents, tins of salmon - the
pride of the eye and the lust of the flesh - tempted them in vain.
They had but the one idea - tobacco, the island currency,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: destroying wire and machine guns without much risk of loss, so
soon as the big guns have done their duty by the enemy guns. And
also behind the Tank itself, it is useless to conceal, lies the
possibility of bringing up big guns and big gun ammunition,
across nearly any sort of country, as fast as the advance can
press forward. Hitherto every advance has paid a heavy toll to
the machine gun, and every advance has had to halt after a couple
of miles or so while the big guns (taking five or six days for
the job) toiled up to the new positions.
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It is impossible to restrain a note of sharp urgency from what
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells: of constitution, no need of toil. For such a life, what we
should call the weak are as well equipped as the strong, are
indeed no longer weak. Better equipped indeed they are, for the
strong would be fretted by an energy for which there was no
outlet. No doubt the exquisite beauty of the buildings I saw was
the outcome of the last surgings of the now purposeless energy of
mankind before it settled down into perfect harmony with the
conditions under which it lived--the flourish of that triumph
which began the last great peace. This has ever been the fate of
energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then
come languor and decay.
The Time Machine |
