| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: uprooted out of one world and flung down into another--perfectly
civil.
"Oh! How do you do? Won't you sit down?"
That's what I said. This horrible but, I assure you, perfectly
true reminiscence tells you more than a whole volume of
confessions a la Jean Jacques Rousseau would do. Observe! I
didn't howl at her, or start upsetting furniture, or throw myself
on the floor and kick, or allow myself to hint in any other way
at the appalling magnitude of the disaster. The whole world of
Costaguana (the country, you may remember, of my seaboard tale),
men, women, headlands, houses, mountains, town, campo (there was
Some Reminiscences |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Mansion by Henry van Dyke: the rest.
The lives of others in the company were revealed in brief
glimpses
as they talked together--a mother, early widowed, who had kept
her little flock of children together and labored through hard
and heavy
years to bring them up in purity and knowledge--a Sister of
Charity
who had devoted herself to the nursing of poor folk who were
being
eaten to death by cancer--a schoolmaster whose heart and life
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad: "So I have been told," said Ossipon, with a shade of wonder in his
voice. "But I didn't know if - "
"They know," interrupted the little man crisply, leaning against
the straight chair back, which rose higher than his fragile head.
"I shall never be arrested. The game isn't good enough for any
policeman of them all. To deal with a man like me you require
sheer, naked, inglorious heroism." Again his lips closed with a
self-confident snap. Ossipon repressed a movement of impatience.
"Or recklessness - or simply ignorance," he retorted. "They've
only to get somebody for the job who does not know you carry enough
stuff in your pocket to blow yourself and everything within sixty
The Secret Agent |
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 A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: It is for those of my countrymen who will never have this chance, never
meet some one who can guide them to the facts", that I tell these things.
Let them "cut out the dope." At this very moment that I write--November
24, 1919--the dope is being fed freely to all who are ready, whether
through ignorance or through interested motives, to swallow it. The
ancient grudge is being played up strong over the whole country in the
interest of Irish independence.
Ian Hay in his two books so timely and so excellent, Getting Together and
The Oppressed English, could not be as unreserved, naturally, as I can be
about those traits in my own countrymen which have, in the past at any
rate, retarded English cordiality towards Americans. Of these I shall
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