Strange power of speech

[摘要] A friend in graduate school once told me that whenever she was particularly moved by a poem or novel she would hurl the book she was reading across the room. The most recent book to have met this fate was Charles Dickens;;s Hard Times. The culminating chapter of this volume ends, appropriately enough, with a thud: in the chapter entitled ;;Down”, Dickens brings the novel to its deepest point of crisis when Louisa collapses in a heap at the feet of her father, Thomas Gradgrind, who sees with horror ;;the pride of his heart and the triumph of his system, lying, an insensible heap, at his feet.” My friend;;s habit struck me as a bizarre way of responding to moments of terrific beauty in literary works of art. But hers is by no means the oddest account of the imagination;;s power to affect our minds and bodies.

[发布机构] Elsevier