• Blog # 11: Revisit the Barclay Paragraph: Write a Barclay paragraph that connects a quote from one Narrative Project with one of our assigned essays.

In one of the narrative project (by Sophie Horton), she interviewed a man who describes a story that has helped him learn not to judge people. The man he talked about was very lame and messy. He said that the man in the story “ended up suffocating his wife to death because of how much he loved her.” This was interesting to me because I thought that we could control a lot of our actions, and before I listened to this narrative I disagreed with a statement that was made in Strawson’s piece of writing. Strawson said that “there’s an experimentally well-attested distinction between humans who have…emotion of authorship… and those who, like myself, have no such emotion, and feel that their thoughts are things that just happen.” When I read this quote It changed my whole perspective that you can control everything that you think. The man in the narrative audio clip told a story about another man who could not control his feelings for his wife, they were so strong that he ended up killing her. If he could control his feelings all of the time he would have stopped himself to keep from killing her or having something else happen. But, it proves the point that some people can’t control their thoughts and lead to things that “just happen.” Though that is an unfortunate story, it opened my eyes and changed how I view certain things.