| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald: last thing I expected."
Clara didn't gloat. She changed the subject immediately. But she
had started him thinking and he believed she was partly right. He
felt like a factory-owner who after accusing a clerk of
dishonesty finds that his own son, in the office, is changing the
books once a week. His poor, mistreated will that he had been
holding up to the scorn of himself and his friends, stood before
him innocent, and his judgment walked off to prison with the
unconfinable imp, imagination, dancing in mocking glee beside
him. Clara's was the only advice he ever asked without dictating
the answer himselfexcept, perhaps, in his talks with Monsignor
This Side of Paradise |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from La Grande Breteche by Honore de Balzac: display of suspicion. Gorenflot could not help making some noise.
Madame de Merret seized a moment when he was unloading some bricks,
and when her husband was at the other end of the room to say to
Rosalie: 'My dear child, I will give you a thousand francs a year if
only you will tell Gorenflot to leave a crack at the bottom.' Then she
added aloud quite coolly: 'You had better help him.'
"Monsieur and Madame de Merret were silent all the time while
Gorenflot was walling up the door. This silence was intentional on the
husband's part; he did not wish to give his wife the opportunity of
saying anything with a double meaning. On Madame de Merret's side it
was pride or prudence. When the wall was half built up the cunning
La Grande Breteche |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Art of War by Sun Tzu: robbed of all his belongings.
[Ts`ao Kung's note is: "We can merely obstruct the enemy's
road or divide his army, but not sweep away all his accumulated
stores." Water can do useful service, but it lacks the terrible
destructive power of fire. This is the reason, Chang Yu
concludes, why the former is dismissed in a couple of sentences,
whereas the attack by fire is discussed in detail. Wu Tzu (ch.
4) speaks thus of the two elements: "If an army is encamped on
low-lying marshy ground, from which the water cannot run off, and
where the rainfall is heavy, it may be submerged by a flood. If
an army is encamped in wild marsh lands thickly overgrown with
The Art of War |
