| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: "I resume," he continued. "So, our friend Poulain was once called in
by you to attend old M. Pillerault, the Countess Popinot's great-
uncle; that is one of your claims to my devotion. Poulain goes to see
your landlord (mark this!) once a fortnight; he learned all these
particulars from him. M. Pillerault was present at his grand-nephew's
wedding--for he is an uncle with money to leave; he has an income of
fifteen thousand francs, though he has lived like a hermit for the
last five-and-twenty years, and scarcely spends a thousand crowns--
well, /he/ told Poulain all about this marriage. It seems that your
old musician was precisely the cause of the row; he tried to disgrace
his own family by way of revenge.--If you only hear one bell, you only
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells: the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a
suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same
wonder at what will come next as I felt then. I took the
starting lever in one hand and the stopping one in the other,
pressed the first, and almost immediately the second. I seemed
to reel; I felt a nightmare sensation of falling; and, looking
round, I saw the laboratory exactly as before. Had anything
happened? For a moment I suspected that my intellect had tricked
me. Then I noted the clock. A moment before, as it seemed, it
had stood at a minute or so past ten; now it was nearly half-past
three!
The Time Machine |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: consul at Smyrna, and he afterwards died in Paris, leaving my mother
pregnant with me, his seventh child. Our property was all stolen by
friends of my grandfather; in fact, we were ruined. My mother, who
lived on her diamonds, which she sold one by one, married, in 1799, my
step-father, Monsieur Yung, a purveyor. But my mother is dead, and I
have quarrelled with my step-father, who, between ourselves, is a
blackguard; he is still alive, but I never see him. That's why, in
despair, left all to myself, I went off to the wars as a private in
1813. Well, to go back to the time I returned to Greece; you wouldn't
believe with what joy old Ali Tebelen received the grandson of Czerni-
Georges. Here, of course, I call myself simply Georges. The pacha gave
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