| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Shakespeare: Suffering my friend for my sake to approve her.
If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain,
And losing her, my friend hath found that loss;
Both find each other, and I lose both twain,
And both for my sake lay on me this cross:
But here's the joy; my friend and I are one;
Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone.
XLIII
When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: others. What had seemed to be one thing it now appears is
two; and, like some puzzle in arithmetic, the verse is made
at the same time to read in fives and to read in fours.
But again, four is not necessary. We do not, indeed, find
verses in six groups, because there is not room for six in
the ten syllables; and we do not find verses of two, because
one of the main distinctions of verse from prose resides in
the comparative shortness of the group; but it is even common
to find verses of three. Five is the one forbidden number;
because five is the number of the feet; and if five were
chosen, the two patterns would coincide, and that opposition
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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 To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: the easel, but she said to herself, One must. She braced herself to stand
the awful trial of some one looking at her picture. One must, she said,
one must. And if it must be seen, Mr Bankes was less alarming than
another. But that any other eyes should see the residue of her
thirty-three years, the deposit of each day's living mixed with something
more secret than she had ever spoken or shown in the course of all those
days was an agony. At the same time it was immensely exciting.
Nothing could be cooler and quieter. Taking out a pen-knife, Mr Bankes
tapped the canvas with the bone handle. What did she wish to indicate by
the triangular purple shape, "just there"? he asked.
It was Mrs Ramsay reading to James, she said. She knew his objection--
To the Lighthouse |
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 Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: "Is it not sufficient if the criminal be rendered HARMLESS? Why
should we still punish? Punishment itself is terrible!"--with
these questions gregarious morality, the morality of fear, draws
its ultimate conclusion. If one could at all do away with danger,
the cause of fear, one would have done away with this morality at
the same time, it would no longer be necessary, it WOULD NOT
CONSIDER ITSELF any longer necessary!--Whoever examines the
conscience of the present-day European, will always elicit the
same imperative from its thousand moral folds and hidden
recesses, the imperative of the timidity of the herd "we wish
that some time or other there may be NOTHING MORE TO FEAR!" Some
Beyond Good and Evil |
