| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: tools, others as tooling. I'm between the two; there are days
when I use them as scenery, other days when I want them as
society; so that, as you see, my library represents a makeshift
compromise between looks and brains, and the collectors look down
on me almost as much as the students."
Glennard, without answering, was mechanically taking one book
after another from the shelves. His hands slipped curiously over
the smooth covers and the noiseless subsidence of opening pages.
Suddenly he came on a thin volume of faded manuscript.
"What's this?" he asked, with a listless sense of wonder.
"Ah, you're at my manuscript shelf. I've been going in for that
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner: have vanished, will not the foundation on which they are built remain?"
She was silent then for a while, and said somewhat dreamily, more as though
speaking to herself than to him,
"They ask, What will you gain, even if man does not become extinct?--you
will have brought justice and equality on to the earth, and sent love from
it. When men and women are equals they will love no more. Your highly-
cultured women will not be lovable, will not love.
"Do they see nothing, understand nothing? It is Tant Sannie who buries
husbands one after another, and folds her hands resignedly,--'The Lord
gave, and the Lord hath taken away, and blessed be the name of the Lord,'--
and she looks for another. It is the hard-headed, deep thinker who, when
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Tono Bungay by H. G. Wells: services on mutual terms in enterprising hotels abroad, a
tremulous, obstinate little being with sporadic hairs upon his
face, spectacles, a red button nose, and aged black raiment. He
was evidently enormously impressed by my uncle's monetary
greatness, and by his own inkling of our identity, and he shone
and brimmed over with tact and fussy helpfulness. He was eager
to share the watching of the bedside with me, he proffered
services with both hands, and as I was now getting into touch
with affairs in London again, and trying to disentangle the
gigantic details of the smash from the papers I had succeeded in
getting from Biarritz, I accepted his offers pretty generously,
|
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 The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad: his life; and perhaps even to give it a modelling according to his
own ideas. And for all you know he may be on the track of a
masterpiece; but observe: if it happens to be one nobody will see
it. It can be only for himself. And even he won't be able to see
it in its completeness except on his death-bed. There is something
fine in that."
I had blushed with pleasure; such fine ideas had never entered my
head. But there was something fine. . . . How far all this seemed!
How mute and how still! What a phantom he was, that man with a
beard of at least seven tones of brown. And those shades of the
other kind such as Baptiste with the shaven diplomatic face, the
The Arrow of Gold |
