| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: and her own tackle swinging the burden over the rail, is
accomplishing in freedom a function of her life. There is no
restraint; there is space: clear water around her, and a clear sky
above her mastheads, with a landscape of green hills and charming
bays opening around her anchorage. She is not abandoned by her own
men to the tender mercies of shore people. She still shelters, and
is looked after by, her own little devoted band, and you feel that
presently she will glide between the headlands and disappear. It
is only at home, in dock, that she lies abandoned, shut off from
freedom by all the artifices of men that think of quick despatch
and profitable freights. It is only then that the odious,
The Mirror of the Sea |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Tono Bungay by H. G. Wells: she, in her indignation, destroyed every vestige that she could
of him. Never a photograph nor a scrap of his handwriting have I
seen; and it was, I know, only the accepted code of virtue and
discretion that prevented her destroying her marriage
certificate and me, and so making a clean sweep of her
matrimonial humiliation. I suppose I must inherit something of
the moral stupidity that would enable her to make a holocaust of
every little personal thing she had of him. There must have been
presents made by him as a lover, for example--books with kindly
inscriptions, letters perhaps, a flattened flower, a ring, or
such-like gage. She kept her wedding-ring, of course, but all
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: in most cases they supply a more or less myth-like explanation, they
declare that evil is one side of the conflict between Ahriman and
Ormazd, or that it is the punishment of an act of disobedience, of
the fall of man and world alike from a state of harmony. Their
case, like his, is that THIS world is damned.
We do not find the belief that superposed upon the miseries of this
world there are the still bitterer miseries of punishments after
death, so nearly universal. The endless punishments of hell appear
to be an exploit of theory; they have a superadded appearance even
in the Christian system; the same common tendency to superlatives
and absolutes that makes men ashamed to admit that God is finite,
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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 Lysis by Plato: They may be.
Perhaps, I said, about half, or possibly, altogether, right, if their
meaning were rightly apprehended by us. For the more a bad man has to do
with a bad man, and the more nearly he is brought into contact with him,
the more he will be likely to hate him, for he injures him; and injurer and
injured cannot be friends. Is not that true?
Yes, he said.
Then one half of the saying is untrue, if the wicked are like one another?
That is true.
But the real meaning of the saying, as I imagine, is, that the good are
like one another, and friends to one another; and that the bad, as is often
Lysis |
