| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: certain pleasure in the sound of their own voices.
As for those who are restricted to silence, I can only wonder how
they bear their solemn and cheerless isolation. And yet, apart
from any view of mortification, I can see a certain policy, not
only in the exclusion of women, but in this vow of silence. I have
had some experience of lay phalansteries, of an artistic, not to
say a bacchanalian character; and seen more than one association
easily formed and yet more easily dispersed. With a Cistercian
rule, perhaps they might have lasted longer. In the neighbourhood
of women it is but a touch-and-go association that can be formed
among defenceless men; the stronger electricity is sure to triumph;
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: Hegelian or Darwinian philosophy.
(7) As no two words are precise equivalents (just as no two leaves of the
forest are exactly similar), it is a mistaken attempt at precision always
to translate the same Greek word by the same English word. There is no
reason why in the New Testament (Greek) should always be rendered
'righteousness,' or (Greek) 'covenant.' In such cases the translator may
be allowed to employ two words--sometimes when the two meanings occur in
the same passage, varying them by an 'or'--e.g. (Greek), 'science' or
'knowledge,' (Greek), 'idea' or 'class,' (Greek), 'temperance' or
'prudence,'--at the point where the change of meaning occurs. If
translations are intended not for the Greek scholar but for the general
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac: sops, hard and dry and cut with studied parsimony. Two stools placed
beside the table, on one of which the old woman sat down, showed that
the miserly pair were eating their suppers. Cornelius went to the door
and pushed two iron shutters into their place, closing, no doubt, the
loopholes through which they had been gazing into the street; then he
returned to his seat. Philippe Goulenoire (so called) next beheld the
brother and sister dipping their sops into the egg in turn, and with
the utmost gravity and the same precision with which soldiers dip
their spoons in regular rotation into the mess-pot. This performance
was done in silence. But as he ate, Cornelius examined the false
apprentice with as much care and scrutiny as if he were weighing an
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