| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: is that element of sight by which a soul is depressed and dragged down
again into the visible world, because she is afraid of the invisible and of
the world below--prowling about tombs and sepulchres, near which, as they
tell us, are seen certain ghostly apparitions of souls which have not
departed pure, but are cloyed with sight and therefore visible.
(Compare Milton, Comus:--
'But when lust,
By unchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul talk,
But most by lewd and lavish act of sin,
Lets in defilement to the inward parts,
The soul grows clotted by contagion,
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: intolerably egotistical. Worst of all, he is a tyrant. But look! she
said, looking at him. Look at him now. She looked at him reading the
little book with his legs curled; the little book whose yellowish pages
she knew, without knowing what was written on them. It was small; it
was closely printed; on the fly-leaf, she knew, he had written that he
had spent fifteen francs on dinner; the wine had been so much; he had
given so much to the waiter; all was added up neatly at the bottom of
the page. But what might be written in the book which had rounded its
edges off in his pocket, she did not know. What he thought they none
of them knew. But he was absorbed in it, so that when he looked up, as
he did now for an instant, it was not to see anything; it was to pin
To the Lighthouse |
