My husband and I had been married nearly twenty-two years when I acquired Stevens-Johnson syndrome, a disorder where my immune system (免疫系统) responded to a virus by producing painful blisters (水疱). Although my long-term evaluation was good, I, who had been so fiercely independent, rapidly became absolutely helpless.

    My husband, Scott, stepped up to the plate, taking care of kids and cooking dinners. He also became my personal caretaker, applying the medicine to all of my blisters because my hands couldn't do the job. Needless to say, I had negative emotions, bouncing from embarrassment to shame caused by total reliance on someone other than myself.

    At one point when I had mentally and physically hit bottoms I remember thinking that Scott must somehow love me more than I could ever love him. With my illness, he had become the stronger one, and I the weaker one. And this disturbed me.

    I recovered from my illness, but I couldn't seem to recover from the thought that I loved my husband less than he loved me. This seeming distinction in our love continued to annoy me for the year following my illness.

    Then recently Scott and I went on a long bike ride. He's an experienced cyclist; I'm quite the green hand. At one point with a strong headwind and sharp pain building in my tired legs, I really thought I couldn't go any further. Seeing me struggle, Scott pulled in front of me and yelled over his shoulder, “Stay close behind me.” As I fell into the draft of his six- foot- three- inch frame and followed his steps, I discovered that my legs quit burning and I was able to catch my breath. My husband was pulling me along again. At this very moment I woke up to what I now believe: during these and other tough times, love has the opportunity to become stronger when one partner learns to lean on the other.

    I pray my husband will always be strong and healthy. But if he should ever become the struggling one, whether on a bike ride or with an illness, I trust I'll be ready to call out to him: Stay close behind me-my turn to pull you along.

    Throughout the history of the arts, the nature of creativity has remained constant to artists. No matter what objects they select, artists are to bring forth new forces and forms that cause change—to find poetry where no one has ever seen or experienced it before.

    Landscape is another unchanging element (元素) of art. It can be found from ancient times through the 17th­century Dutch painters to the 19th­century romanticists (浪漫主义艺术家 ) and impressionists. In the 1970s Alfred Leslie, one of the new American realists, continued this practice. Leslie sought out the same place where Thomas Cole, a romanticist, had produced paintings of the same scene a century and a half before. Unlike Cole who insists on a feeling of loneliness and the idea of finding peace in nature, Leslie paints what he actually sees. In his paintings, there is no particular change in emotions and he includes ordinary things like the highway in the background. He also takes advantage of the latest developments of color photography to help both the eyes and the memory when he improves his painting back in his workroom.

Besides, all art begs the age­old question: What is real? Each generation of artists has shown their understanding of reality in one form or another. The impressionists saw reality in brief emotional effects, the realists in everyday subjects and in forest scenes, and the Cro­Magnon cave people in their naturalistic drawings of the animals in the ancient forests. To sum up, understanding reality is a necessary struggle for artists of all periods.

    Over thousands of years the function of the arts has remained relatively constant. Past or present, Eastern or Western, the arts are a basic part of our immediate experience. Many and different are the faces of art, and together they express the basic need and hope of human beings.

    Exciting screams of joy from two happy little girls rang across the beach. But I walked along, ignoring them. I'd come to this faraway beach on my sailboat, a place to escape. My marriage was in trouble. I worried about the harm to my two boys. But I didn't know how to make things better.

    “Help! Help!” The girls screamed. I saw one girl was at the edge of the surf, yelling. I charged into the waves, swam to her and seized her. “But where is the other girl?” I looked across the water and saw a small head after a big wave. I shifted the girl Td rescued to my back. She told me the other girl was her sister. For a moment I thought of my boys. How much they loved each other. How much I loved them.

    I quickened my swimming and held the second little girl. We were at least 50 yards from land. I couldn't swim that far with two girls hanging on to me. But there was no time to wait. I swam as hard as I could, but the weight of the girls grew heavier with every minute. My lungs burned. I opened my mouth to take a breath, but instead swallowed water. I couldn't breathe. From behind me I felt an unbelievable force, lifting.

    “Mommy!” The cry drew my attention. I looked up. An elderly man was trying to drag me out of the water. Two women were swimming toward shore. “Thank you,” one of the woman cried. “You saved my daughters.” My efforts and my struggles had paid off. I thought of that big wave, lifting me and pushing me. When my body had failed me, and when all hope was disappearing, I was given the strength I needed.

    I stoop up. My family were waiting for me. There were things I could do. I just needed to make an effort. The strength would be given to me.

    Memory, they say, is a matter of practice and exercise. If you have the wish and really make a conscious(自觉的) effort, then you can quite easily improve your ability to remember things. But even if you are successful, there are times when your memory seems to play tricks on you.

    Sometimes you remember things that really did not happen. One morning last week, for example, I got up and found that I had left the front door unlocked all night, yet I clearly remember locking it carefully the night before.

    Memory “tricks” work the other way as well. Once in a while you remember not doing something, and then find out that you did. One day last month, for example, I was sitting in a barber(理发师) shop waiting for my turn to get a haircut, and suddenly I realized that I had got a haircut two days before at the barber shop across the street from my office.

    We always seem to find something funny and amusing in incidents caused by people's forgetfulness or absent-mindedness. Stories about absent-minded professors have been told for years, and we never get tired of hearing new ones. Unfortunately, however, absent-mindedness is not always funny. There are times when “tricks” of our memory can cause us great trouble.

    Everything has its root. “Holiday”, is no exception. The origin of “holiday” is easy to see, coming from “holy day”, a day of particular religious significance, often celebrating the life of a saint (圣徒), during which no work was to be done. As far back as the 11th century, “holidays”, especially the major feast days, were times of “celebration and amusement”, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it.

    The number of holidays steadily increased during the Middle Ages, until a medieval Englishman would have had the luxury of 40 to 50 days a year off work, depending on where he lived, in addition to a free day on Sundays.

    During the Reformation, Henry VIII abolished most of the holidays partly because of the Protestant (新教徒的) suspicion of saints, but more practically, because, according to historian Eamon Duffy, “A large number of holidays were making the people poor by limiting agriculture.” The people took a different view and organized a protest march—the Pilgrimage of Grace—partly to protect their days off.

    Though at first the religious and festive senses of holiday were combined, the word gradually came to be used for any kind of relaxing break from work. As the word was drawing away from a religious society, the number of authorized holidays was reduced, until by 1834 most workers had only four official days off a year, in addition to Sundays. Many factory workers amplified this time by staying home on “Saint Monday” to recover from what they had gotten up to the day before.

    By the late 19th century, employers were compromising and offering half-day Saturdays, the beginning of the “weekend”, a term first used in 1879. In 1908, an innovative mill in New England gave its employees all of Saturday off, and the practice of their getting the whole Saturday off spread widely during the Great Depression as a way to keep employment up. It took 400 years, but finally workers could enjoy as many holidays as they had in the 15th century.

    From ancient stories to modern researches, the label（标签）attached to being left-handed is undeniable. Left-handed people, or "lefties" as they are often called, are generally believed to be good at art — Leonardo da Vinci, Picasso and Michelangelo are all left-handed.

    Our brain is divided into two parts: the left hemisphere(大脑半球)and the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere, linked to logic and analysis, is responsible for the right side of the body. The right hemisphere, linked to creativity and imagination, controls the left side of the body. So, people tend to believe lefties are controlled by the right side of the brain, and are more creative than right-handers. Some also think that lefties may not be as good as right-handers in mathematics and problem-solving skills.

    However; a recent study carried out by scientists from the University of Liverpool in the UK and the University of Milan in Italy proved this theory wrong. The study involved(涉及)more than 2,300 students in Italy aged between 6 and 17 years old. They were asked to complete several mathematical tasks of different levels. It turned out the left-handers outperformed the others when the tasks involved difficult problem-solving. This pattern was particularly clear in male adolescents. However; when it came to simple arithmetic, there was no difference between left-handers and right-handers.

    It was also discovered that those who are "severely" right-handed performed less well in all the experiments compared to "medium" right-handers and left-handers.

    "Taken together, these findings show that handedness does influence abilities to some degree," the study's authors wrote. However, "handedness is just an indirect expression of brain function," wrote psychology professor Giovanni Sala from the University of Liverpool in the UK, the lead author of the study. Sala also noted that only one third of people with a highly-developed right side of the brain are left-handed. It means that there are lots of right-handed people with a similar brain function as left-handers.