| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells: at the sunlit devastation that flowed past the windows. And
just outside the terminus the train jolted over temporary
rails, and on either side of the railway the houses were
blackened ruins. To Clapham Junction the face of London
was grimy with powder of the Black Smoke, in spite of
two days of thunderstorms and rain, and at Clapham Junc-
tion the line had been wrecked again; there were hundreds
of out-of-work clerks and shopmen working side by side
with the customary navvies, and we were jolted over a hasty
relaying.
All down the line from there the aspect of the country
War of the Worlds |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lin McLean by Owen Wister: they tell yu' things, and you tell them things. And when it don't make no
particular matter one way or the other, yu' give 'em your honest opinion
and talk straight to 'em, and they'll come to you the same way. So that
when yu're ridin' the range alone sometimes, and thinkin' a lot o' things
over on top maybe of some dog-goned hill, you'll say to yourself about
some fellow yu' know mighty well, 'There's a man is a good friend of
mine.' And yu' mean it. And it's so. Yet when matters is serious, as
onced in a while they're bound to get, and yu're in a plumb hole, where
is the man then--your good friend? Why, he's where yu' want him to be.
Standin' off, keepin' his mouth shut, and lettin' yu' find your own trail
out. If he tried to show it to yu', yu'd likely hit him. But shucks!
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: possible on this head, the old dates turn up again; the old calendars;
the old names; the old edicts, which long since had sunk to the level of
the antiquarian's learning; even the old bailiffs, who had long seemed
mouldering with decay. The nation takes on the appearance of that crazy
Englishman in Bedlam, who imagines he is living in the days of the
Pharaohs, and daily laments the hard work that he must do in the
Ethiopian mines as gold digger, immured in a subterranean prison, with a
dim lamp fastened on his head, behind him the slave overseer with a long
whip, and, at the mouths of the mine a mob of barbarous camp servants
who understand neither the convicts in the mines nor one another,
because they do not speak a common language. "And all this," cries the
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