| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Pivot of Civilization by Margaret Sanger: various agencies of church, state, and privately endowed institutions;
the ``crimes of charity'' that are occasionally exposed in newspaper
scandals. These and similar strictures we may ignore as irrelevant to
our present purpose, as inevitable but not incurable faults that have
been and are being eliminated in the slow but certain growth of a
beneficent power in modern civilization. In reply to such criticisms,
the protagonist of modern philanthropy might justly point to the
honest and sincere workers and disinterested scientists it has
mobilized, to the self-sacrificing and hard-working executives who
have awakened public attention to the evils of poverty and the menace
to the race engendered by misery and filth.
|
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 Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: of self-indulgence wasting the substance of future volumes. It
seems that I am not sufficiently literary. Indeed a man who
never wrote a line for print till he was thirty-six cannot bring
himself to look upon his existence and his experience, upon the
sum of his thoughts, sensations and emotions, upon his memories
and his regrets, and the whole possession of his past, as only so
much material for his hands. Once before, some three years ago,
when I published "The Mirror of the Sea," a volume of impressions
and memories, the same remarks were made to me. Practical
remarks. But, truth to say, I have never understood the kind of
thrift they recommended. I wanted to pay my tribute to the sea,
Some Reminiscences |
