| 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: The glands are also excited into action through the irritation
of adjoining parts. Thus when the nostrils are irritated by
pungent vapours, though the eyelids may be kept firmly closed,
tears are copiously secreted; and this likewise follows from
a blow on the nose, for instance from a boxing-glove. A stinging
switch on the face produces, as I have seen, the same effect.
In these latter cases the secretion of tears is an incidental result,
and of no direct service. As all these parts of the face,
including the lacrymal glands, are supplied with branches
of the same nerve, namely, the fifth, it is in some degree
intelligible that the effects of the excitement of any one branch
Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Poems by T. S. Eliot: To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"--
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all."
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett: had to make business arrangements to have these conveyed to her
house in a wheelbarrow.
I never shall forget the day at Green Island. The town of
Dunnet Landing seemed large and noisy and oppressive as we came
ashore. Such is the power of contrast; for the village was
so still that I could hear the shy whippoorwills singing that night
as I lay awake in my downstairs bedroom, and the scent of Mrs.
Todd's herb garden under the window blew in again and again with
every gentle rising of the seabreeze.
XII
A Strange Sail
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