| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: Those who watch nature detect her in jests of the shrewdest irony. For
instance, she places toads in the neighborhood of flowers, as she had
placed this man by the side of this rose of love.
"Will you play the violin this evening, my dear Duke?" asked the
woman, as she unhooked a cord to let a handsome curtain fall over the
door.
"Play the violin!" thought Prince Emilio. "What can have happened to
my palazzo? Am I awake? Here I am, in that woman's bed, and she
certainly thinks herself at home--she has taken off her cloak! Have I,
like Vendramin, inhaled opium, and am I in the midst of one of those
dreams in which he sees Venice as it was three centuries ago?"
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Art of War by Sun Tzu: Tu Yu's great treatise on the Constitution, the other similarly
enshrined in the T`AI P`ING YU LAN encyclopedia. In both the
complete text is to be found, though split up into fragments,
intermixed with other matter, and scattered piecemeal over a
number of different sections. Considering that the YU LAN takes
us back to the year 983, and the T`UNG TIEN about 200 years
further still, to the middle of the T`ang dynasty, the value of
these early transcripts of Sun Tzu can hardly be overestimated.
Yet the idea of utilizing them does not seem to have occurred to
anyone until Sun Hsing-yen, acting under Government instructions,
undertook a thorough recension of the text. This is his own
The Art of War |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: grown-ups, often my father himself, would read the contents aloud.
All the papers were unsigned, and it was a point of honor not
to peep at the handwriting; but, despite this, we almost always
guessed the author, either by the style, by his self-consciousness,
or else by the strained indifference of his expression.
When I was a boy, and for the first time wrote a set of French
verses for the letter-box, I was so shy when they were read that I
hid under the table, and sat there the whole evening until I was
pulled out by force.
For a long time after, I wrote no more, and was always fonder
of hearing other people's compositions read than my own.
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