This text discusses the different expressions and physical manifestations of emotions such as crying and laughing. It explains the gestures, such as raising shoulders or squeezing eyes shut, that accompany these emotions. The text also explores how crying and laughing may emerge from similar causes and emphasizes the distinction between joy and mere delight.
Real Activities
and keep the eyes towards the heavens, the arms downwards, the hands together, and the fingers interlinked. Others, full of anxiety, raise their shoulders up to the ears. Those who wish to cry abundantly often squeeze their eyes shut, draw their eyebrows together, and form wrinkles beside the eyes and below the mouth, like when the lips are drawn downward in a bow shape. In contrast, those who laugh heartily have straight and open eyebrows: but there is also laughter that does not reach the lips. Just as one might weep with joy, sometimes one cries from the same cause: and those who are precise distinguish between joy and delight. Crying while laughing, or laughing while crying can both appear more natural; but the truth and dignity of the event often forbid such behavior. This is discussed more broadly in our instruction.
One might also distinguish between someone crying and someone who appeared composed; that is someone who cried a little while ago, as the crying often stops only slightly from laughing, where laughter had also started intensely. In hearty crying, the breathing in and out is stronger than usual; and when the spirits are agitated, even after the cause (sometimes helped by the words and consolations of others) ceases, the strongest movements can decrease, that is, slow down; but the spirits, and breathing in and out, cannot happen immediately, but only in intervals, which gradually return to their former state.