| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: own food nor make her own clothes, nor was she engaged in any social,
political, or intellectual or artistic labour. Though able to dance for a
night or play tennis for an afternoon, she was yet hardly able to do her
own hair or attire herself, and appeared absolutely to have lost all power
of compelling herself to do anything which was at the moment fatiguing or
displeasing, as all labour is apt to be, however great its ultimate reward.
In a life of twenty-eight years this woman had probably not contributed one
hour's earnest toil, mental or physical, to the increase of the sum total
of productive human labour. Surrounded with acres of cultivable land, she
would possibly have preferred to lie down and die of hunger rather than
have cultivated half an acre for food. This is an extreme case; but the
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from The First Men In The Moon by H. G. Wells: view of the affair that has come to him, I must insist, since he began to
feel secure among the lunar people; and as for the "stealing a march"
conception, I am quite willing to let the reader decide between us on what
he has before him. I know I am not a model man - I have made no pretence
to be. But am I that?
However, that is the sum of my wrongs. From this point I can edit Cavor
with an untroubled mind, for he mentions me no more.
It would seem the Selenites who had come upon him carried him to some
point in the interior down "a great shaft" by means of what he describes
as "a sort of balloon." We gather from the rather confused passage in
which he describes this, and from a number of chance allusions and hints
The First Men In The Moon |
