| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela: "To rob a poor old lady!"
"To steal from a poor defenseless woman!"
They prove their compassion by word and deed: a
harsh verdict against the culprit; a five-peso bill for the
victim.
"And I'm telling you the truth," Blondie declares.
"Don't think it's wrong to kill, because when you kill,
it's always out of anger. But stealing--Bah!"
This profound piece of reasoning meets with unani-
mous assent. After a short silence while he meditates,
a colonel ventures his opinion:
The Underdogs |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Art of War by Sun Tzu: be strictly forbidden, and no officer allowed to inquire by
divination into the fortunes of an army, for fear the soldiers'
minds should be seriously perturbed.' The meaning is," he
continues, "that if all doubts and scruples are discarded, your
men will never falter in their resolution until they die."]
27. If our soldiers are not overburdened with money, it is
not because they have a distaste for riches; if their lives are
not unduly long, it is not because they are disinclined to
longevity.
[Chang Yu has the best note on this passage: "Wealth and
long life are things for which all men have a natural
The Art of War |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from 1984 by George Orwell: over but in reality were merely coated with dust. A very old man, bent but
active, with white moustaches that bristled forward like those of a prawn,
pushed open the swing door and went in. As Winston stood watching, it
occurred to him that the old man, who must be eighty at the least, had
already been middle-aged when the Revolution happened. He and a few others
like him were the last links that now existed with the vanished world of
capitalism. In the Party itself there were not many people left whose ideas
had been formed before the Revolution. The older generation had mostly
been wiped out in the great purges of the fifties and sixties, and the few
who survived had long ago been terrified into complete intellectual
surrender. If there was any one still alive who could give you a truthful
1984 |
