| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Art of War by Sun Tzu: the sense, and we get no help from them there. The Chinese words
Sun Tzu used to indicate the cause of the people's impoverishment
clearly have reference to some system by which the husbandmen
sent their contributions of corn to the army direct. But why
should it fall on them to maintain an army in this way, except
because the State or Government is too poor to do so?]
11. On the other hand, the proximity of an army causes
prices to go up; and high prices cause the people's substance to
be drained away.
[Wang Hsi says high prices occur before the army has left
its own territory. Ts`ao Kung understands it of an army that has
The Art of War |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tarzan the Untamed by Edgar Rice Burroughs: mand. They were a most unlovely band and chief among
them in authority and repulsiveness was the black sergeant
Usanga. The object of their interest was a British aeroplane.
Immediately after the Englishman had been brought to
Numabo's village Usanga had gone out in search of the plane,
prompted partially by curiosity and partially by an intention
to destroy it, but when he had found it, some new thought had
deterred him from carrying out his design. The thing repre-
sented considerable value as he well knew and it had occurred
to him that in some way he might turn his prize to profit.
Every day he had returned to it, and while at first it had filled
Tarzan the Untamed |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: (whom one must certainly read with an eye to their motives if one
MUST read them), concealed this time under the new form of the
scientific spirit; moreover, there is not absent from them a
secret struggle with the pangs of conscience, from which a race
of former Puritans must naturally suffer, in all their scientific
tinkering with morals. (Is not a moralist the opposite of a
Puritan? That is to say, as a thinker who regards morality as
questionable, as worthy of interrogation, in short, as a problem?
Is moralizing not-immoral?) In the end, they all want English
morality to be recognized as authoritative, inasmuch as mankind,
or the "general utility," or "the happiness of the greatest
Beyond Good and Evil |
