| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: forests; we do not know what ceremonies they perform.
Jemmy Button would not eat land-birds, because "eat dead
men": they are unwilling even to mention their dead friends.
We have no reason to believe that they perform any sort of
religious worship; though perhaps the muttering of the old
man before he distributed the putrid blubber to his famished
party, may be of this nature. Each family or tribe has a
wizard or conjuring doctor, whose office we could never
clearly ascertain. Jemmy believed in dreams, though not, as
I have said, in the devil: I do not think that our Fuegians
were much more superstitious than some of the sailors; for
The Voyage of the Beagle |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Anthem by Ayn Rand: The sunrays danced upon colors, colors,
more colors than we thought possible,
we who had seen no houses save the
white ones, the brown ones and the grey.
There were great pieces of glass on the
walls, but it was not glass, for when we
looked upon it we saw our own bodies and
all the things behind us, as on the face
of a lake. There were strange things which we
had never seen and the use of which we do
not know. And there were globes of glass
Anthem |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: decoration in ebony, representing the chief scenes in the life of Van
Artevelde,--that brewer of Ghent who, for a brief hour, was King of
Flanders. This wall-covering, of which there were no less than sixty
panels, contained about fourteen hundred principal figures, and was
held to be Van Huysum's masterpiece. The officer appointed to guard
the burghers whom Charles V. determined to hang when he re-entered his
native town, proposed, it is said, to Van Claes to let him escape if
he would give him Van Huysum's great work; but the weaver had already
despatched it to Douai.
The parlor, whose walls were entirely panelled with this carving,
which Van Huysum, out of regard for the martyr's memory, came to Douai
|
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 This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald: addicted to Oriental scents)delivered from success and hope and
poverty into that long chute of indulgence which led, after all,
only to the artificial lake of death.
There were so many places where one might deteriorate pleasantly:
Port Said, Shanghai, parts of Turkestan, Constantinople, the
South Seasall lands of sad, haunting music and many odors, where
lust could be a mode and expression of life, where the shades of
night skies and sunsets would seem to reflect only moods of
passion: the colors of lips and poppies.
STILL WEEDING
Once he had been miraculously able to scent evil as a horse
This Side of Paradise |
