| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: unpremeditated as it is insincere. When I am a little tired after a
morning's writing I find the faint suggestion getting into every
other sentence that our blunders and misdeeds embodied, after the
fashion of the prophet Hosea, profound moral truths. Indeed, I feel
so little confidence in my ability to keep this altogether out of my
book that I warn the reader here that in spite of anything he may
read elsewhere in the story, intimating however shyly an esoteric
and exalted virtue in our proceedings, the plain truth of this
business is that Isabel and I wanted each other with a want entirely
formless, inconsiderate, and overwhelming. And though I could tell
you countless delightful and beautiful things about Isabel, were
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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 Rescue by Joseph Conrad: looked with his bowed head and clasped knee like a masculine
rendering of mournful meditation. Such attitudes are met with
sometimes on the sculptures of ancient tombs. D'Alcacer began to
speak:
"She is a representative woman and yet one of those of whom there
are but very few at any time in the world. Not that they are very
rare but that there is but little room on top. They are the
iridescent gleams on a hard and dark surface. For the world is
hard, Captain Lingard, it is hard, both in what it will remember
and in what it will forget. It is for such women that people toil
on the ground and underground and artists of all sorts invoke
The Rescue |
