| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Art of War by Sun Tzu: from Khotan and other Central Asian states with the object of
crushing Yarkand. The King of Kutcha replied by dispatching his
chief commander to succor the place with an army drawn from the
kingdoms of Wen-su, Ku-mo, and Wei-t`ou, totaling 50,000 men.
Pan Ch`ao summoned his officers and also the King of Khotan to a
council of war, and said: 'Our forces are now outnumbered and
unable to make head against the enemy. The best plan, then, is
for us to separate and disperse, each in a different direction.
The King of Khotan will march away by the easterly route, and I
will then return myself towards the west. Let us wait until the
evening drum has sounded and then start.' Pan Ch`ao now secretly
The Art of War |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: She laid her hand upon his arm and looked hard into his eyes;
and he saw with wonder that, for the first time since the
moment of their meeting, every trace of colour had faded from
her cheek.
'Do so,' she said, 'and - weigh my words well - you kill me
as certainly as with a knife.'
'God bless me!' exclaimed Challoner.
'Oh,' she cried, 'I can see you disbelieve my story and make
light of the perils that surround me; but who are you to
judge? My family share my apprehensions; they help me in
secret; and you saw yourself by what an emissary, and in what
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: exciting, work, for I never was sure from one moment to another but that
he would be on me. I took comfort, however, from the reflection that a
lion rarely attacks a man--rarely, I say; sometimes he does, as you will
see--unless he is cornered or wounded. I must have been nearly an hour
hunting after that lion. Once I thought I saw something move in a clump
of tambouki grass, but I could not be sure, and when I trod out the
grass I could not find him.
"At last I worked up to the head of the kloof, which made a cul-de-sac.
It was formed of a wall of rock about fifty feet high. Down this rock
trickled a little waterfall, and in front of it, some seventy feet from
its face, rose a great piled-up mass of boulders, in the crevices and on
Long Odds |
