| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad: rupted. "I've the right to know the meaning of
this infernal nonsense." In the half light of the
room, which was greenish, because of the tree-tops
screening the window, I saw him writhe his meagre
shoulders. It came into my head, as disconnected
ideas will come at all sorts of times into one's head,
that this, most likely, was the very room where, if
the tale were true, Falk had been lectured by Mr.
Siegers, the father. Mr. Siegers' (the son's) over-
whelming voice, in brassy blasts, as though he had
been trying to articulate his words through a trom-
Falk |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Art of War by Sun Tzu: struggle. Hence we may conclude that our treatise was not in
existence in 505, before which date Yueh does not appear to have
scored any notable success against Wu. Ho Lu died in 496, so
that if the book was written for him, it must have been during
the period 505-496, when there was a lull in the hostilities, Wu
having presumably exhausted by its supreme effort against Ch`u.
On the other hand, if we choose to disregard the tradition
connecting Sun Wu's name with Ho Lu, it might equally well have
seen the light between 496 and 494, or possibly in the period
482-473, when Yueh was once again becoming a very serious menace.
[33] We may feel fairly certain that the author, whoever he may
The Art of War |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: Speaker, the table and the mace and the chapel-like Gothic
background with its sombre shadows, conspire together, produce a
confused, uncertain feeling in me, as though I was walking upon a
pavement full of trap-doors and patches of uncovered morass. A
misplaced, well-meant "Hear, Hear!" is apt to be extraordinarily
disconcerting, and under no other circumstances have I had to speak
with quite the same sideways twist that the arrangement of the House
imposes. One does not recognise one's own voice threading out into
the stirring brown. Unless I was excited or speaking to the mind of
some particular person in the house, I was apt to lose my feeling of
an auditor. I had no sense of whither my sentences were going, such
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