| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: trouble, which a good man ought to undergo, not for the sake of speaking
and acting before men, but in order that he may be able to say what is
acceptable to God and always to act acceptably to Him as far as in him
lies; for there is a saying of wiser men than ourselves, that a man of
sense should not try to please his fellow-servants (at least this should
not be his first object) but his good and noble masters; and therefore if
the way is long and circuitous, marvel not at this, for, where the end is
great, there we may take the longer road, but not for lesser ends such as
yours. Truly, the argument may say, Tisias, that if you do not mind going
so far, rhetoric has a fair beginning here.
PHAEDRUS: I think, Socrates, that this is admirable, if only practicable.
|
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 Shadow out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft: of old in the millions of years since the time of my dreams? Of
the subterrene mazes which had underlain the city and linked all
the titan towers, how much had still survived the writhings of
earth's crust?
Had I come upon a whole buried world of unholy
archaism? Could I still find the house of the writing master,
and the tower where S'gg'ha, the captive mind from the star-headed
vegetable carnivores of Antarctica, had chiselled certain pictures
on the blank spaces of the walls?
Would the passage at the second
level down, to the hall of the alien minds, be still unchoked
Shadow out of Time |
