| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: and gave him two classical examples of makeshifts out of a
text-book. In exchange he described to me a jury-rudder he had
invented himself years before, when in command of a
three-thousand-ton steamer. It was, I declare, the cleverest
contrivance imaginable. "May be of use to you some day," he
concluded. "You will go into steam presently. Everybody goes
into steam."
There he was wrong. I never went into steam--not really. If I
only live long enough I shall become a bizarre relic of a dead
barbarism, a sort of monstrous antiquity, the only seaman of the
dark ages who had never gone into steam--not really.
A Personal Record |
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 God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: succeeds at times in wresting his capital out of his control. But
his relationship to that is the same relationship as ours to the
backward and insubordinate parishes, criminal slums, and disorderly
houses in our own private texture.
It is clear that the believer who is a lunatic is, as it were, only
the better part of himself. He serves God with this unconquered
disposition in him, like a man who, whatever else he is and does, is
obliged to be the keeper of an untrustworthy and wicked animal. His
beast gets loose. His only resort is to warn those about him when
he feels that jangling or excitement of the nerves which precedes
its escapes, to limit its range, to place weapons beyond its reach.
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