| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: being chaffed on that point in the fourth couplet about the perfumes;
that Shakespear's revulsions, as the sonnet immediately preceding
shews, were as violent as his ardors, and were expressed with the
realistic power and horror that makes Hamlet say that the heavens got
sick when they saw the queen's conduct; and then ask Mr Harris whether
any woman could have stood it for long, or have thought the "sugred"
compliment worth the cruel wounds, the cleaving of the heart in twain,
that seemed to Shakespear as natural and amusing a reaction as the
burlesquing of his heroics by Pistol, his sermons by Falstaff, and his
poems by Cloten and Touchstone.
Jupiter and Semele
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Art of War by Sun Tzu: beetling cliffs." Tu Mu's note is "ground covered with trees and
rocks, and intersected by numerous ravines and pitfalls." This
is very vague, but Chia Lin explains it clearly enough as a
defile or narrow pass, and Chang Yu takes much the same view. On
the whole, the weight of the commentators certainly inclines to
the rendering "defile." But the ordinary meaning of the Chinese
in one place is "a crack or fissure" and the fact that the
meaning of the Chinese elsewhere in the sentence indicates
something in the nature of a defile, make me think that Sun Tzu
is here speaking of crevasses.]
should be left with all possible speed and not approached.
The Art of War |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Book of Remarkable Criminals by H. B. Irving: commit a possibly unnecessary crime. He decides to forget and
ignore utterly his wife who is waiting patiently in America. A
year passes. The expectant wife gets no sign of her husband's
existence. She comes back to Europe, visits under a false name
the town in which her faithless husband and his bride are living,
discovers the truth and divulges the intended crime to the
authorities. A sentence of penal servitude for life rewards this
perfidious criminal.[9]
[9] Case of the Scheffer couple at Linz, cited by Sighele.
Derues said to a man who was looking at a picture in the Palais
de Justice: "Why study copies of Nature when you can look at
A Book of Remarkable Criminals |
