[D]

The German poet and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
pondered the question of how organisms develop in his scientific
studies of form and structure immature plants and animals, a field he
found and named morphology. His search for a single basic body plan
(31)
across all life-forms led him to think about the prevalence of repeating
(32)
segments in body structures. The spinal columns of fish, reptiles,
(33)
birds and mammals, for instance, all are made of long strings of
(34)
repeated vertebrae. Among invertebrates the growth of virtually
identical segments is how striking: in earthworms, for example, even
(35)
internal organs are repeated in serial segments. Likewise, the
abdomen of flies and other insects are segmented, as are the
(36)
successive wormlike articulations in crabs, shrimps and other
crustaceans. To Goethe the evidence suggested that nature takes a
building-block approach to generate life, repeating a basic element
(37)
again and again to arrive at a complicated organism. The only glaring
(38)
hole he could see in the theory was the apparent lack of any sort of
segmentation in the vertebrate heads. In 1970 he hypothesized that
(39)
spinal vertebrate is modified during the development to form the
(40)
skull.

[E]

Literature is a means by which we know ourselves. By it we
(41)
meet future selves, and recognize past selves; against it we match our
present self. Its primary function is to validate and re-create the self
in all its individuality and distinctness. In doing so, it cements a
sense of relationship between the self and the otherness of the book,
and allows us a notion of ourselves as sociable. Its shared knowledge
is vicarious experience; by this means we enlarge our understandings
(42)
of what it means to be human, of the corporate and independent
(43)
nature of human society. The act of reading the book marks both our
difference in and our place in the human fabric. The more we read,
(44)
the more we are. In the act of reading silently we are alone from the
(45)
book, separate from one's own immediate surroundings. Yet in the
(46)
act of reading we enter other minds and other places, enlarge our
(47)
dialogue with the world. Thus paradoxically, while disengaging from
the immediate we are increasing its scope. In silence, reading
activates a deeply creative function of consciousness. We are deeply
committed to the narrative which we coexist while engaged in
(48)
reading. All kinds of present physical discomfortness may be
(49)
unnoticed while we are reading, and actual time is replaced by
narrative time. To imaginatively enter a fictional world by reading it
(50)
is then both a liberation from self and an expansion of self.