| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: rolled from room to room, she sang. Rubbing the glass of the long
looking-glass and leering sideways at her swinging figure a sound
issued from her lips--something that had been gay twenty years before
on the stage perhaps, had been toothless, bonneted, care-taking woman,
was robbed of meaning, was like the voice of witlessness, humour,
persistency itself, trodden down but springing up again, so that as she
lurched, dusting, wiping, she seemed to say how it was one long sorrow
and trouble, how it was getting up and going to bed again, and bringing
things out and putting them away again. It was not easy or snug this
world she had known for close on seventy years. Bowed down she was
with weariness. How long, she asked, creaking and groaning on her
To the Lighthouse |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: indifferent tourist. There is some one by who is out of
sympathy with the scene, and is not moved up to the measure of
the occasion; and that some one is himself. The world is
disenchanted for him. He seems to himself to touch things
with muffled hands, and to see them through a veil. His life
becomes a palsied fumbling after notes that are silent when he
has found and struck them. He cannot recognise that this
phlegmatic and unimpressionable body with which he now goes
burthened, is the same that he knew heretofore so quick and
delicate and alive.
He is tempted to lay the blame on the very softness and
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