| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs: thing and stood upon the level mesa which crowned it.
Immediately from all about, out of burrows and
rough, rocky lairs, poured a perfect torrent of beasts
similar to my captors. They clustered about, jabber-
ing at my guards and attempting to get their hands
upon me, whether from curiosity or a desire to do me
bodily harm I did not know, since my escort with
bared fangs and heavy blows kept them off.
Across the mesa we went, to stop at last before a large
pile of rocks in which an opening appeared. Here my
guards set me upon my feet and called out a word
Pellucidar |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Art of War by Sun Tzu: difficult. I did the conversion in complete ignorance of Chinese
(except for what I learned while doing the conversion). Thus, I
faced the difficult task of paraphrasing it while retaining as
much of the important text as I could. Every paraphrase
represents a loss; thus I did what I could to retain as much of
the text as possible. Because the 1910 text contains a Chinese
concordance, I was able to transliterate proper names, books, and
the like at the risk of making the text more obscure. However,
the text, on the whole, is quite satisfactory for the casual
reader, a transformation made possible by conversion to an etext.
However, I come away from this task with the feeling of loss
The Art of War |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: crowned with success, was called the sister of it by the Greeks. For we
can scarcely find any other examples where so small and weak a party of
men by bold courage overcame such numerous and powerful enemies, or
brought greater blessings to their country by so doing. But the
subsequent change of affairs made this action the more famous; for the
war which forever ruined the pretensions of Sparta to command, and put an
end to the supremacy she then exercised alike by sea and by land,
proceeded from that night, in which Pelopidas not surprising any fort, or
castle, or citadel, but coming, the twelfth man, to a private house,
loosed and broke, if we may speak truth in metaphor, the chains of the
Spartan sway, which before seemed of adamant and indissoluble.
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