| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: proper care of a ship's spars it is just as well for a seaman to
have nothing the matter with his ears. Such is the intimacy with
which a seaman had to live with his ship of yesterday that his
senses were like her senses, that the stress upon his body made him
judge of the strain upon the ship's masts.
I had been some time at sea before I became aware of the fact that
hearing plays a perceptible part in gauging the force of the wind.
It was at night. The ship was one of those iron wool-clippers that
the Clyde had floated out in swarms upon the world during the
seventh decade of the last century. It was a fine period in ship-
building, and also, I might say, a period of over-masting. The
 The Mirror of the Sea |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Russia in 1919 by Arthur Ransome: general exchange of new money for old, after which the old
will be declared invalid. "Of course," said Krestinsky, "they
will cheat in every possible way, scattering out the money
among a number of friends and relations. But something
will have been done in cleaning them up, and that process
will be completed by a second exchange of money later on."
Fifteen milliards of new notes for the first exchange are
already printed, but they think that twenty milliards will be
necessary.
I asked if the new money was better looking than the old, if
it looked more like money that was worth having than the
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