| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Hated Son by Honore de Balzac: I kneel until I see you. Your old father prays you, he humbles himself
before his child as before God himself."
The hated son paid no heed to this language bristling with social
ideas and vanities he did not comprehend; his soul remained under the
impressions of unconquerable terror. He was silent, suffering great
agony. Towards evening the old seigneur, after exhausting all formulas
of language, all resources of entreaty, all repentant promises, was
overcome by a sort of religious contrition. He knelt down upon the
sand and made a vow:--
"I swear to build a chapel to Saint-Jean and Saint-Etienne, the
patrons of my wife and son, and to found one hundred masses in honor
|
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 The Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft: lonely farm-house. In the course of time callers professed to
hear sounds in the sealed upper storey even when all the family
were downstairs, and they wondered how swiftly or how lingeringly
a cow or bullock was usually sacrificed. There was talk of a complaint
to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals but nothing
ever came of it, since Dunwich folk are never anxious to call
the outside world's attention to themselves.
About 1923, when
Wilbur was a boy of ten whose mind, voice, stature, and bearded
face gave all the impressions of maturity, a second great siege
of carpentry went on at the old house. It was all inside the sealed
The Dunwich Horror |
