| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Ursula by Honore de Balzac: de Serizy, whose youth had been at its climax during the Empire.
"How is that you all manage?" asked Savinien one day, at the end of a
gay breakfast with a knot of young dandies, with whom he was intimate
as the young men of the present day are intimate with each other, all
aiming for the same thing and all claiming an impossible equality.
"You were no richer than I and yet you get along without anxiety; you
contrive to maintain yourselves, while as for me I make nothing but
debts."
"We all began that way," answered Rastignac, laughing, and the laugh
was echoed by Lucien de Rubempre, Maxime de Trailles, Emile Blondet,
and others of the fashionable young men of the day.
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: motion, or previously in motion and afterwards at rest, without
experiencing change, is impossible.
Impossible.
And surely there cannot be a time in which a thing can be at once neither
in motion nor at rest?
There cannot.
But neither can it change without changing.
True.
When then does it change; for it cannot change either when at rest, or when
in motion, or when in time?
It cannot.
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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 Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: and while the male remains a complex, highly active, and winded creature,
the female, fastening herself by the head into the flesh of some living
animal and sucking its blood, has lost wings and all activity, and power of
locomotion; having become a mere distended bladder, which when filled with
eggs bursts and ends a parasitic existence which has hardly been life. It
is not impossible, and it appears, indeed, highly probable, that it has
been this degeneration and parasitism on the part of the female which has
set its limitation to the evolution of ants, creatures which, having
reached a point of mental development in some respects almost as high as
that of man, have yet become curiously and immovably arrested. The whole
question of sex-parasitism among the lower animals is one throwing
|
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 The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad: sounded deprecatory. Nobody but a friend could
be so angry as that. I became a little crestfallen.
Our chief engineer also took a characteristic view
of my action, but in a kindlier spirit.
He was young, too, but very thin, and with a
mist of fluffy brown beard all round his haggard
face. All day long, at sea or in harbour, he could
be seen walking hastily up and down the after-
deck, wearing an intense, spiritually rapt ex-
pression, which was caused by a perpetual con-
sciousness of unpleasant physical sensations in
The Shadow Line |
