The Future And An Unseen Shore

"He sat down by the window and gazed up at the clear sky, into the future."

-Ian Fleming, Live And Let Die (London, 2004), 9, p. 86.

 

"She gazed past the river and the forest beyond, northeasterly toward an unseen shore."

-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 467-640 AT 11, p. 570.

 

OK. I found a similarity between these two sentences. Bond gazes into his unknown future, hopefully a good one - the sky is clear. Janne Floris of the Time Patrol gazes into her subjective future but also into the objective past because she is traveling backward in time to identify an event that her arrival at that earlier time has already caused.

Both characters gaze toward what is physically before them - the sky, the river and forest. Both also focus on what is as yet unknown, whatever is going to happen to them next.

 

And, in both cases, we read on...