Submit Your Favourite Mellow Passage!

[Illuminati]

Quite frankly, I need a passage of text for an A2 Psychology experiment of mine. I'm looking for a passage who's language is generally calm and relaxed, kinda like a mellowing passage. Has to be fairly long though, but not "war and peace"-ish ;)

Yes, I have found one of my own - But I thought "Why not use one of the most opinionated active intelligence networks on the internet today?" :D And I want to see how this works.

Submit passages if you can for now - Should they occur, please leave bitch-slapping for at least 24 hours after this post ;)

[Lilmiss]

how about some thing from "the hobbit" - "tolkien". the very first page is my fave.
or "eric thompson" of "magic roundabout fame. ;)

only replied cos no-one else had, and thought i'd put my tuppence worth in. good luck. youre gonna have to expand on what kinda material you want, or go to book world, where the smart people live. :blink:

/sure glad i left college 5 years ago.

[j2k4]

Something about your request put me in mind of the old Jethro Tull song: "Skating Away (On the Thin Ice of a New Day)"

Check that one out. :)

[sparsely]

poems by William Carlos Williams come to mind for me.

example:

The Red Wheelbarrow

So much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

- William Carlos Williams

[Illuminati]

Nice - My default choice to tell you the truth is about three pages from Lord of the Rings, so I'm seeing what you guys can come up with.

Only things I really mean is that it can be racy, designed to be comedy etc. Basically anything which doesn't end up hyping the reader (That's the whole point of the experiment - That's why ;))

[chalice]

WHEN YOU ARE OLD.

When you are old and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep:

How many loved your moments of sad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face among a crowd of stars.

W.B. Yeats.

[sparsely]

Ah. Then how about the foreward to The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy:

This is recited from memory. :P

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the wester spiral arm
of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded, yellow sun.

Orbting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is a small, blue-green
planet who's ape-like descendants are
so vastly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has-or rather, had- a problem, which was this: most of the people living
on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this
problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green
pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of
paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were
miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming
down from the trees in the first place. And some said that e even the trees had been
a bad move, and that no one should have ever left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to
a tree for saying how nice it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting
on her own in a small cafe in Ricksmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had
been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a
good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have
to get nailed to anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible,
stupid catastrophe occured, and the idea was lost forever.

This is not her story.

But it is the story of that terrible, stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.
It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy.
Not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occured,
never seen or even heard of by any Earthman.

Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.
In fact, it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great
publishing corporations of Ursa Minor-of which no Earthman had ever hear either.
Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one-more popular
than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-Three More
Things To Do In Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colupbid's trilogy
of philosophical blockbusters, Where God Went Wrong, Some More Of God's Greatest Mistakes,
and Who Is This God Person Anyway?

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim o fthe Galaxy, the
Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia
Galactia as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has
many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate,
it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper, and second, it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed
in large friendly letters on its cover.

But the story of this terrible, stupid Thursday, the story of its extraordinary consequences,
and the story of how these consequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable
book begins very simply.
It begins with a house.

[Lilmiss]

Originally posted by Sparsely@18 June 2003 - 06:49
Ah. Then how about the foreward to The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy:


fantastic, ive just finished reading this book again, and it gets better each time. :D

a tall figure appeared silhoutted in the hatchway. it walked down the ramp and stood in front of arthur.
"youre a jerk, dent", it simply said. hehehe. :D

[Illuminati]

Heh - A quote from 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". Nothing comes close to the work of that :D

I think I'll use that - Now to find an e-book version of it.

Thanks a lot :D