| 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: adding that the gesture is performed "in a more subdued and less
demonstrative manner than is the case with civilized nations."
This circumstance may account for its not having been noticed
by four of my informants.
These statements, relating to Europeans, Hindoos, the hill-tribes
of India, Malays, Micronesians, Abyssinians, Arabs, Negroes, Indians of
North America, and apparently to the Australians--many of these natives
having had scarcely any intercourse with Europeans--are sufficient
to show that shrugging the shoulders, accompanied in some cases
by the other proper movements, is a gesture natural to mankind.
This gesture implies an unintentional or unavoidable action
Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: But what affected me in the most lively manner was the wealth of this
day-labourer, paying a two months' pleasure visit to the States, and
preparing to return in the saloon, and the new testimony rendered by
his story, not so much to the horrors of the steerage as to the
habitual comfort of the working classes. One foggy, frosty December
evening, I encountered on Liberton Hill, near Edinburgh, an Irish
labourer trudging homeward from the fields. Our roads lay together,
and it was natural that we should fall into talk. He was covered
with mud; an inoffensive, ignorant creature, who thought the Atlantic
Cable was a secret contrivance of the masters the better to oppress
labouring mankind; and I confess I was astonished to learn that he
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Extracts From Adam's Diary by Mark Twain: drink it.
Three Months Later
The kangaroo still continues to grow, which is very strange and
perplexing. I never knew one to be so long getting its growth.
It has fur on its head now; not like kangaroo fur, but exactly
like our hair, except that it is much finer and softer, and instead
of being black is red. I am like to lose my mind over the capricious
and harassing developments of this unclassifiable zoological freak.
If I could catch another one--but that is hopeless; it is a new
variety, and the only sample; this is plain. But I caught a true
kangaroo and brought it in, thinking that this one, being lonesome,
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