| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells: air of impartiality, turning towards the Time Traveller.
`Not a bit,' said the Time Traveller, and, to the Psychologist:
`You think. You can explain that. It's presentation below the
threshold, you know, diluted presentation.'
`Of course,' said the Psychologist, and reassured us. `That's
a simple point of psychology. I should have thought of it. It's
plain enough, and helps the paradox delightfully. We cannot see
it, nor can we appreciate this machine, any more than we can the
spoke of a wheel spinning, or a bullet flying through the air.
If it is travelling through time fifty times or a hundred times
faster than we are, if it gets through a minute while we get
The Time Machine |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Black Dwarf by Walter Scott: "Why, I love this poor exiled king with all my heart; and my
father was an old Killiecrankie man, and I long to see some
amends on the Unionist courtiers, that have bought and sold old
Scotland, whose crown has been so long independent."
"And for the sake of these shadows," said his monitor, "you are
going to involve your country in war and yourself in trouble?"
"I involve? No!--but, trouble for trouble, I had rather it came
to-morrow than a month hence. COME, I know it will; and, as your
country folks say, better soon than syne--it will never find me
younger--and as for hanging, as Sir John Falstaff says, I can
become a gallows as well as another. You know the end of the old
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: "Egypt? Oh! Egypt is all sand," replied Georges, by no means taken
aback. "There's nothing green but the valley of the Nile. Draw a green
line down a sheet of yellow paper, and you have Egypt. But those
Egyptians--fellahs they are called--have an immense advantage over us.
There are no gendarmes in that country. You may go from end to end of
Egypt, and you won't see one."
"But I suppose there are a good many Egyptians," said Mistigris.
"Not as many as you think for," replied Georges. "There are many more
Abyssinians, and Giaours, and Vechabites, Bedouins, and Cophs. But all
that kind of animal is very uninteresting, and I was glad enough to
embark on a Genoese polacca which was loading for the Ionian Islands
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