The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: so that the long spun-out comedy of its petty-statism, and its
dynastic as well as its democratic many-willed-ness, might
finally be brought to a close. The time for petty politics is
past; the next century will bring the struggle for the dominion
of the world--the COMPULSION to great politics.
209. As to how far the new warlike age on which we Europeans have
evidently entered may perhaps favour the growth of another and
stronger kind of skepticism, I should like to express myself
preliminarily merely by a parable, which the lovers of German
history will already understand. That unscrupulous enthusiast for
big, handsome grenadiers (who, as King of Prussia, brought into
 Beyond Good and Evil |
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 Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: natural enough that Susy, from the very moment of finding him
again, should feel neither pity nor regret, and that Strefford
should already be to her as if he had never been. After all,
there was something Providential in such arrangements.
He stooped closer, pressed her dreaming head between his hands,
and whispered: "Wake up; it's bedtime."
She rose; but as she moved away to turn on the light he caught
her hand and drew her to the window. They leaned on the sill in
the darkness, and through the clouds, from which a few drops
were already falling, the moon, labouring upward, swam into a
space of sky, cast her troubled glory on them, and was again
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