| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells: great help--may even be hindrances--to a civilized man. And
in a state of physical balance and security, power, intellectual
as well as physical, would be out of place. For countless years
I judged there had been no danger of war or solitary violence, no
danger from wild beasts, no wasting disease to require strength
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
The Time Machine |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Fanny Herself by Edna Ferber: twenty-four, who was presented as the pivot about whom the
plot would revolve. Now we are led, protesting, up to a
grubby urchin of five and are invited to watch him through
twenty years of intimate minutiae. In extreme cases we have
been obliged to witness his evolution from swaddling clothes
to dresses, from dresses to shorts (he is so often English),
from shorts to Etons.
The thrill we get for our pains is when, at twenty-five, he
jumps over the traces and marries the young lady we met in
her cradle on page two. The process is known as a
psychological study. A publisher's note on page five
Fanny Herself |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Ebb-Tide by Stevenson & Osbourne: all round the purao arose and fell a dismal sound of men
coughing, and strangling as they coughed. The sick natives, with
the islander's impatience of a touch of fever, had crawled from
their houses to be cool and, squatting on the shore or on the
beached canoes, painfully expected the new day. Even as the
crowing of cocks goes about the country in the night from farm to
farm, accesses of coughing arose, and spread, and died in the
distance, and sprang up again. Each miserable shiverer caught the
suggestion from his neighbour, was torn for some minutes by that
cruel ecstasy, and left spent and without voice or courage when
it passed. If a man had pity to spend, Papeete beach, in that
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