2 pieces from Art of War — each retold in modern English and traced to its source.
Five ways to attack with fire, each waiting on the right wind and the right season. But the chapter turns, at its end, into the book’s gravest warning: never make war out of anger. A ruined state cannot be restored; the dead cannot be brought back to life.
Why does water flung downhill roll boulders? Momentum. Sun Tzu’s coldest, most beautiful chapter is about shì — the force a position releases when it is timed right — and the endless interplay of the direct and the indirect, from which all advantage is born.