| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter: objects of nature. W. H. Hudson--himself in many
respects having this deep and primitive relation to nature--
speaks in a very interesting and autobiographical
volume[2] of the extraordinary fascination exercised upon
him as a boy, not only by a snake, but by certain trees,
and especially by a particular flowering-plant "not more
than a foot in height, with downy soft pale green leaves,
and clusters of reddish blossoms, something like valerian."
. . . "One of my sacred flowers," he calls it, and insists on
the "inexplicable attraction" which it had for him. In
various ways of this kind one can perceive how particular
Pagan and Christian Creeds |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Agesilaus by Xenophon: captives as fellow-men rather than take vengeance upon them as
evildoers;[10] or, on a change of quarters, if aware of little
children left behind by the dealers (since the men often sold them in
the belief that it would be impossible to carry them away and rear
them), he would show concern in behalf of these poor waifs and have
them conveyed to some place of safety; or he would entrust them to the
care of fellow-prisoners also left behind on account of old age; in no
case must they be left to ravening dogs and wolves. In this way he won
the goodwill not only of those who heard tell of these doings but of
the prisoners themselves. And whenever he brought over a city to his
side, he set the citizens free from the harsher service of a bondsman
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from 1984 by George Orwell: though he daily saw them hurrying to and fro in the corridors or
gesticulating in the Two Minutes Hate. He knew that in the cubicle next
to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at
tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been
vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. There was a
certain fitness in this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple
of years earlier. And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy
creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent
for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled
versions--definitive texts, they were called--of poems which had become
ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another were to be
1984 |
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 To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: more important now than the shore. Waves were all round them, tossing
and sinking, with a log wallowing down one wave; a gull riding on
another. About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a
ship had sunk, and she murmured, dreamily half asleep, how we perished,
each alone.
11
So much depends then, thought Lily Briscoe, looking at the sea which
had scarcely a stain on it, which was so soft that the sails and the
clouds seemed set in its blue, so much depends, she thought, upon
distance: whether people are near us or far from us; for her feeling
for Mr Ramsay changed as he sailed further and further across the bay.
To the Lighthouse |
