| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Death of the Lion by Henry James: intensely interested, and who had no connexion with Mr. Rumble, was
to show how far he could make him go. Poor Paraday, in return, was
naturally to write something somewhere about the young artist. She
played her victims against each other with admirable ingenuity, and
her establishment was a huge machine in which the tiniest and the
biggest wheels went round to the same treadle. I had a scene with
her in which I tried to express that the function of such a man was
to exercise his genius - not to serve as a hoarding for pictorial
posters. The people I was perhaps angriest with were the editors
of magazines who had introduced what they called new features, so
aware were they that the newest feature of all would be to make him
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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 Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: After all, a god is a pitiful thing. But the fertility of the
First Mother is not yet exhausted. The life that came from her
has ever climbed up to a higher and higher organization. From
toad and serpent to dwarf, from bear and elephant to giant, from
dwarf and giant to a god with thoughts, with comprehension of the
world, with ideals. Why should it stop there? Why should it not
rise from the god to the Hero? to the creature in whom the god's
unavailing thought shall have become effective will and life, who
shall make his way straight to truth and reality over the laws of
Fricka and the lies of Loki with a strength that overcomes giants
and a cunning that outwits dwarfs? Yes: Erda, the First Mother,
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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 From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: of death, without its being possible even to say that life had ever
existed there.
Michel Ardan, however, thought he recognized a heap of ruins,
to which he drew Barbicane's attention. It was about the 80th
parallel, in 30@ longitude. This heap of stones, rather
regularly placed, represented a vast fortress, overlooking a
long rift, which in former days had served as a bed to the
rivers of prehistorical times. Not far from that, rose to a
height of 17,400 feet the annular mountain of Short, equal to
the Asiatic Caucasus. Michel Ardan, with his accustomed ardor,
maintained "the evidences" of his fortress. Beneath it he
From the Earth to the Moon |
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 Within the Tides by Joseph Conrad: heretic English, pocketing with grave abstraction the small piece
of money the officer threw upon the table in recognition of the
unwritten law that none may enter a wine-shop without buying drink.
His eye was in constant motion as if it were trying to do the work
of the two; but when Byrne made inquiries as to the possibility of
hiring a mule, it became immovably fixed in the direction of the
door which was closely besieged by the curious. In front of them,
just within the threshold, the little man in the large cloak and
yellow hat had taken his stand. He was a diminutive person, a mere
homunculus, Byrne describes him, in a ridiculously mysterious, yet
assertive attitude, a corner of his cloak thrown cavalierly over
Within the Tides |
