More on sighing

[eve_prime]

Telling my mom about her little brother wasn't great, and I slept rather poorly last night, and Lillian put some rather nasty scratches on my leg, but there were some cheerful things today, too. One was a conversation with owl_of_minerva and her friends about Descartes, and one was the surprise of encountering an old friend whom I hadn't seen in about 10 years, a woman I really like.

Here's how Descartes explains the phenomenon of sighing:

"For whereas we are moved to weep when our lungs are full of blood, we are moved to sigh when they are almost empty and some imagined hope or joy opens the orifice of the venous artery which sadness had constricted. Then the little blood remaining in the lungs flows down suddenly into the left-hand side of the heart through this artery, where it is driven by the desire to attain this joy. At the same time this desire agitates all the muscles of the diaphragm and chest, so that air comes rapidly through the mouth into the lungs to fill the place vacated by the blood. And that is what we call 'sighing'."

Source: (The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 1, ed. Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, Cambridge UP 1985, pp. 375)