10 Years After

Time

Last weekend I finished reading H.G. Well's "The Time Machine." While I was reading it I came across a neat passage about the change in language noticed by the Time Traveller :

"I made what progress I could in the language, and in addition I pushed my explorations here and there. Either I missed some subtle point, or their language was excessively simple - almost exclusively composed of concrete substantives and verbs. There seemed to be few, if any, abstract terms, or little use of figurative language. Their sentences were usually simple and of two words, and I failed to convey or understand any but the simplest propositions.

Earlier this week in my philosophy we read an essay by Craig arguing a theistic view of life's meaning which used a lot of literary quotes. Surprisingly, one of them was from the end of "The Time Machine" that details how the Earth ends. It is a very bleak picture. What I thought was perhaps more telling to me was this:

I went out of that gallery and into another and still larger one, which at the first glance reminded me of a military chapel hung with tattered flags. The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified. At the time I will confess that I thought chiefly of the Philosophical Transactions and my own seventeen papers upon physical optics.

(One might take this reference to these works of physical optics to be a sort of comparison between the Time Traveller and Newton. I suppose either by the 'speaker/author', the Time Traveller himself, or by the actual writer, H.G. Wells.)

Over the weekend I plan to find the time to add the poems we've discussed in my poetry class. I added one of them to my other Blogger page, but what I would like to do is perhaps give these others some attempt at explication. Due to room I might add them there and just place a link here to them. Who knows?