| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Two Brothers by Honore de Balzac: keep his clothes clean; dress him in new clothes, and he immediately
made them look like old ones. The elder, on the other hand, took care
of his things out of mere vanity. Unconsciously, the mother acquired a
habit of scolding Joseph and holding up his brother as an example to
him. Agathe did not treat the two children alike; when she went to
fetch them from school, the thought in her mind as to Joseph always
was, "What sort of state shall I find him in?" These trifles drove her
heart into the gulf of maternal preference.
No one among the very ordinary persons who made the society of the two
widows--neither old Du Bruel nor old Claparon, nor Desroches the
father, nor even the Abbe Loraux, Agathe's confessor--noticed Joseph's
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Call of the Canyon by Zane Grey: undertaken alone. Her thrills seemed to be in abeyance to the end of her
journey. That night her sleep was permeated with the steady low whirring of
the wheels. Once, roused by a jerk, she lay awake in the darkness while the
thought came to her that she and all her fellow passengers were really at
the mercy of the engineer. Who was he, and did he stand at his throttle
keen and vigilant, thinking of the lives intrusted to him? Such thoughts
vaguely annoyed Carley, and she dismissed them.
A long half-day wait in Chicago was a tedious preliminary to the second
part of her journey. But at last she found herself aboard the California
Limited, and went to bed with a relief quite a stranger to her. The glare
of the sun under the curtain awakened her. Propped up on her pillows, she
The Call of the Canyon |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Art of War by Sun Tzu: retreating," and the other commentators give similar
explanations. Tu Mu remarks: "When your army has crossed the
border, you should burn your boats and bridges, in order to make
it clear to everybody that you have no hankering after home."]
4. Ground the possession of which imports great advantage
to either side, is contentious ground.
[Tu Mu defines the ground as ground "to be contended for."
Ts`ao Kung says: "ground on which the few and the weak can
defeat the many and the strong," such as "the neck of a pass,"
instanced by Li Ch`uan. Thus, Thermopylae was of this
classification because the possession of it, even for a few days
The Art of War |
