| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Crisis in Russia by Arthur Ransome: others. He was, for example able to persuade the
Communist Party to treat the transport crisis precisely as
they had treated each crisis on the front-that is to say, to
mobilize great numbers of professed Communists to meet it,
giving them in this case the especial task of getting engines
mended and, somehow or other, of keeping trains on the
move.
But neither the bridges mended and the wood cut by the
labor armies, nor the improvement in transport, are any final
proof of the success of industrial conscription. Industrial
conscription in the proper sense of the words is impossible
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Art of War by Sun Tzu: sentence with what went before about rewards and punishments.]
38. When envoys are sent with compliments in their mouths,
it is a sign that the enemy wishes for a truce.
[Tu Mu says: "If the enemy open friendly relations be
sending hostages, it is a sign that they are anxious for an
armistice, either because their strength is exhausted or for some
other reason." But it hardly needs a Sun Tzu to draw such an
obvious inference.]
39. If the enemy's troops march up angrily and remain
facing ours for a long time without either joining battle or
taking themselves off again, the situation is one that demands
The Art of War |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a
problem to life. People must adopt some attitude towards me, and
so pass judgment, both on themselves and me. I need not say I am
not talking of particular individuals. The only people I would
care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered:
those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is:
nobody else interests me. Nor am I making any demands on life. In
all that I have said I am simply concerned with my own mental
attitude towards life as a whole; and I feel that not to be ashamed
of having been punished is one of the first points I must attain
to, for the sake of my own perfection, and because I am so
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