No saldremos de ello todavía, pero observad ya cómo esa otra vida—la vida según el valor—presiona la novela por todas partes, cómo está lista para llenarla y de hecho distorsionarla, ofreciéndole personajes, tramas, fantasías, visiones del universo, cualquier cosa excepto este constante «y luego... y luego», que es la única contribución de nuestra presente investigación.
La vida en el tiempo es tan obviamente vil e inferior que surge de manera natural la pregunta: ¿no puede el novelista abolirla de su obra, así como el místico afirma haberla abolido de su experiencia, e instalar únicamente su radiante alternativa?
Well, there is one novelist who has tried to abolish time, and her failure is instructive: Gertrude Stein. Going much further than Emily Brontë, Sterne or Proust, Gertrude Stein has smashed up and pulverized her clock and scattered its fragments over the world like the limbs of Osiris, and she has done this not from naughtiness but from a noble motive: she has hoped to emancipate fiction from the tyranny of time and to express in it the life by values only. She fails, because as soon as fiction is completely delivered from time it cannot express anything at all, and in her later writing we can see the slope down which she is slipping. She wants to abolish this whole aspect of the story, this sequence in chronology, and my heart goes out to her.