| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: the Paris proletariat answers with the June insurrection, the most
colossal event in the history of European civil wars. The bourgeois
republic won. On its side stood the aristocracy of finance, the
industrial bourgeoisie; the middle class; the small traders' class; the
army; the slums, organized as Guarde Mobile; the intellectual
celebrities, the parsons' class, and the rural population. On the side
of the Parisian proletariat stood none but itself. Over 3,000
insurgents were massacred, after the victory 15,000 were transported
without trial. With this defeat, the proletariat steps to the
background on the revolutionary stage. It always seeks to crowd
forward, so soon as the movement seems to acquire new impetus, but with
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: you love me always?' I seized the elegiac moment, so warm, so flowery,
so full-blown, to lead her to tell her most delightful lies, in the
enchanting language of love. Charlotte displayed her choicest
allurements: She could not live without me; I was to her the only man
in the world; she feared to weary me, because my presence bereft her
of all her wits; with me, all her faculties were lost in love; she was
indeed too tender to escape alarms; for the last six months she had
been seeking some way to bind me to her eternally, and God alone knew
that secret; in short, I was her god!"
The women who heard de Marsay seemed offended by seeing themselves so
well acted, for he seconded the words by airs, and sidelong attitudes,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Art of War by Sun Tzu: already worked out in his mind the details of a clever stratagem,
whereby, as he foresaw, he was able to capture the city and
inflict a crushing defeat on his adversary."]
9. Neither is it the acme of excellence if you fight and
conquer and the whole Empire says, "Well done!"
[True excellence being, as Tu Mu says: "To plan secretly,
to move surreptitiously, to foil the enemy's intentions and balk
his schemes, so that at last the day may be won without shedding
a drop of blood." Sun Tzu reserves his approbation for things
that
"the world's coarse thumb
The Art of War |
