| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad: very sunken in daylight, his eyelids lowered under the stern, dark line
of his eyebrows drawn together by a slight frown.
When I left him there to go back to my room the steward
was finishing dusting. I sent for the mate and engaged him
in some insignificant conversation. It was, as it were,
trifling with the terrific character of his whiskers; but my object
was to give him an opportunity for a good look at my cabin.
And then I could at last shut, with a clear conscience, the door
of my stateroom and get my double back into the recessed part.
There was nothing else for it. He had to sit still on a small
folding stool, half smothered by the heavy coats hanging there.
The Secret Sharer |
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 Criminal Sociology by Enrico Ferri: moral sense, and finally prevails; for, as Victor Hugo says,
``Face to face with duty, to hesitate is to be lost.''[11]
[11] For instance, I will recall a fact which Morel has related of
himself, how one day, as he was crossing a bridge in Paris, he saw
a working-man gazing into the water, and a homicidal idea flashed
across his mind, so that he had to hurry away, for fear of
yielding to the temptation to throw the man into the water.
Again, there is the case of Humboldt's nurse, who was attacked one
day by the temptation to kill her charge, and ran with him to his
mother in order to avoid a disaster. Brierre de Boismont
also tells us of a learned man who, at the sight of a picture in a
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