| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad: The next ten minutes might have been ten
seconds or ten centuries for all my consciousness
had to do with it. People might have been falling
dead around me, houses crumbling, guns firing,
I wouldn't have known. I was thinking: "By
Jove! I have got it." IT being the command. It
had come about in a way utterly unforeseen in my
modest day-dreams.
I perceived that my imagination had been run-
ning in conventional channels and that my hopes
had always been drab stuff. I had envisaged a
 The Shadow Line |
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 Ferragus by Honore de Balzac: street, or beneath the arcades of the Palais-Royal, or in any part of
the world where chance may offer him the sight, a being, man or woman,
at whose aspect a thousand confused thoughts spring into his mind? At
that sight we are suddenly interested, either by features of some
fantastic conformation which reveal an agitated life, or by a singular
effect of the whole person, produced by gestures, air, gait, clothes;
or by some deep, intense look; or by other inexpressible signs which
seize our minds suddenly and forcibly without our being able to
explain even to ourselves the cause of our emotion. The next day other
thoughts and other images have carried out of sight that passing
dream. But if we meet the same personage again, either passing at some
 Ferragus |