| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: nurses. I have long learned to admire and envy the doctors and the
nurses. But there is no cancer hospital so large and populous as
Kalawao and Kalaupapa; and in such a matter every fresh case, like
every inch of length in the pipe of an organ, deepens the note of
the impression; for what daunts the onlooker is that monstrous sum
of human suffering by which he stands surrounded. Lastly, no
doctor or nurse is called upon to enter once for all the doors of
that gehenna; they do not say farewell, they need not abandon hope,
on its sad threshold; they but go for a time to their high calling,
and can look forward as they go to relief, to recreation, and to
rest. But Damien shut-to with his own hand the doors of his own
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from La Grande Breteche by Honore de Balzac: thousand francs; and in a little sealed box ten thousand francs worth
of diamonds. The paper said that in case he should not return, he left
us this money and these diamonds in trust to found masses to thank God
for his escape and for his salvation.
" 'At that time I still had my husband, who ran off in search of him.
And this is the queer part of the story: he brought back the
Spaniard's clothes, which he had found under a big stone on a sort of
breakwater along the river bank, nearly opposite la Grande Breteche.
My husband went so early that no one saw him. After reading the
letter, he burnt the clothes, and, in obedience to Count Feredia's
wish, we announced that he had escaped.
La Grande Breteche |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Twelve Stories and a Dream by H. G. Wells: one could see east and west. Eastward was a great cliff--a thousand
feet high perhaps--coldly grey except for one bright edge of gold,
and beyond it the Isle of the Sirens, and a falling coast that
faded and passed into the hot sunrise. And when one turned to
the west, distinct and near was a little bay, a little beach still
in shadow. And out of that shadow rose Solaro straight and tall,
flushed and golden crested, like a beauty throned, and the white
moon was floating behind her in the sky. And before us from east to
west stretched the many-tinted sea all dotted with little sailing
boats.
"To the eastward, of course, these little boats were grey and very
|
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 Timaeus by Plato: a Pythagorean dream, stripped of qualitative difference and reduced to
mathematical abstractions. They too conform to the principle of the same,
and may be compared with the modern conception of laws of nature. They are
in space, but not in time, and they are the makers of time. They are
represented as constantly thinking of the same; for thought in the view of
Plato is equivalent to truth or law, and need not imply a human
consciousness, a conception which is familiar enough to us, but has no
place, hardly even a name, in ancient Greek philosophy. To this principle
of the same is opposed the principle of the other--the principle of
irregularity and disorder, of necessity and chance, which is only partially
impressed by mathematical laws and figures. (We may observe by the way,
|
