| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: the arts of imitation.
VIVIAN. I don't think so. After all, what the imitative arts
really give us are merely the various styles of particular artists,
or of certain schools of artists. Surely you don't imagine that
the people of the Middle Ages bore any resemblance at all to the
figures on mediaeval stained glass, or in mediaeval stone and wood
carving, or on mediaeval metal-work, or tapestries, or illuminated
MSS. They were probably very ordinary-looking people, with nothing
grotesque, or remarkable, or fantastic in their appearance. The
Middle Ages, as we know them in art, are simply a definite form of
style, and there is no reason at all why an artist with this style
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Phantasmagoria and Other Poems by Lewis Carroll: "Doubt that the stars are fire," so runs his moan,
"Doubt Truth herself, but not my love for thee!"
A sadder vision yet: thine aged sire
Shaming his hoary locks with treacherous wile!
And dost thou now doubt Truth to be a liar?
And wilt thou die, that hast forgot to smile?
Nay, get thee hence! Leave all thy winsome ways
And the faint fragrance of thy scattered flowers:
In holy silence wait the appointed days,
And weep away the leaden-footed hours.
III.
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: evidence of his overmastering passion. Mademoiselle de Villenoix had
no doubt destroyed the real letters that she received, eloquent
witnesses to the delirium she inspired.
The first of these papers, evidently a rough sketch, betrays by its
style and by its length the many emendations, the heartfelt alarms,
the innumerable terrors caused by a desire to please; the changes of
expression and the hesitation between the whirl of ideas that beset a
man as he indites his first love-letter--a letter he never will
forget, each line the result of a reverie, each word the subject of
long cogitation, while the most unbridled passion known to man feels
the necessity of the most reserved utterance, and like a giant
Louis Lambert |
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 At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: us to see in some of the very last and most decadent sculptures
a shambling, primitive mammal, used sometimes for food and sometimes
as an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers, whose vaguely simian
and human foreshadowings were unmistakable. In the building of
land cities the huge stone blocks of the high towers were generally
lifted by vast-winged pterodactyls of a species heretofore unknown
to paleontology.
The persistence with which the Old Ones survived
various geologic changes and convulsions of the earth’s crust
was little short of miraculous. Though few or none of their first
cities seem to have remained beyond the Archaean Age, there was
At the Mountains of Madness |
