| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin: observers have seen their eyes freely watering on such occasions;
and in one instance the tears rolled down their cheeks. Mr. Bulmer,
a missionary in a remote part of Victoria, remarks, "that they have a keen
sense of the ridiculous; they are excellent mimics, and when one of them
is able to imitate the peculiarities of some absent member of the tribe,
it is very common to hear all in the camp convulsed with laughter."
With Europeans hardly anything excites laughter so easily as mimicry;
and it is rather curious to find the same fact with the savages of Australia,
who constitute one of the most distinct races in the world.
In Southern Africa with two tribes of Kafirs, especially with
the women, their eyes often fill with tears during laughter.
Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Myths and Myth-Makers by John Fiske: divining-rod. The persons who told these stories were not
weaving ingenious allegories about thunder-storms; they were
telling stories, or giving utterance to superstitions, of
which the original meaning was forgotten. The old grannies
who, along with a stoical indifference to the fate of quails
and partridges, used to impress upon me the wickedness of
killing robins, did not add that I should be struck by
lightning if I failed to heed their admonitions. They had
never heard that the robin was the bird of Thor; they merely
rehearsed the remnant of the superstition which had survived
to their own times, while the essential part of it had long
Myths and Myth-Makers |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: into the kitchen, now to the threshing-floor, now through the
gate, and I could hardly turn my head quickly enough to watch
her.
And the oftener she fluttered by me with her beauty, the more
acute became my sadness. I felt sorry both for her and for myself
and for the Little Russian, who mournfully watched her every time
she ran through the cloud of chaff to the carts. Whether it was
envy of her beauty, or that I was regretting that the girl was
not mine, and never would be, or that I was a stranger to her; or
whether I vaguely felt that her rare beauty was accidental,
unnecessary, and, like everything on earth, of short duration;
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories |
