| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: of many events that are impossible; and even the most faithful histories,
if they do not wholly misrepresent matters, or exaggerate their importance
to render the account of them more worthy of perusal, omit, at least, almost
always the meanest and least striking of the attendant circumstances; hence
it happens that the remainder does not represent the truth, and that such as
regulate their conduct by examples drawn from this source, are apt to fall
into the extravagances of the knight-errants of romance, and to entertain
projects that exceed their powers.
I esteemed eloquence highly, and was in raptures with poesy; but I thought
that both were gifts of nature rather than fruits of study. Those in whom
the faculty of reason is predominant, and who most skillfully dispose their
Reason Discourse |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: At last the doctor forbade Mme. Willemsens to leave her room. Every
day it was brightened by the flowers that she loved, and her children
were always with her. One day, early in November, she sat at the piano
for the last time. A picture--a Swiss landscape--hung above the
instrument; and at the window she could see her children standing with
their heads close together. Again and again she looked from the
children to the landscape, and then again at the children. Her face
flushed, her fingers flew with passionate feeling over the ivory keys.
This was her last great day, an unmarked day of festival, held in her
own soul by the spirit of her memories. When the doctor came, he
ordered her to stay in bed. The alarming dictum was received with
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Art of War by Sun Tzu: the chances of its being other than a bona fide production are
sensibly diminished. The great age of forgeries did not come
until long after. That it should have been forged in the period
immediately following 473 is particularly unlikely, for no one,
as a rule, hastens to identify himself with a lost cause. As for
Yeh Shui-hsin's theory, that the author was a literary recluse,
that seems to me quite untenable. If one thing is more apparent
than another after reading the maxims of Sun Tzu, it is that
their essence has been distilled from a large store of personal
observation and experience. They reflect the mind not only of a
born strategist, gifted with a rare faculty of generalization,
The Art of War |
