| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: researches led him occasionally to visit the studios of
Treffinger's friends and erstwhile disciples, he found their
Treffinger manner fading as the ring of Treffinger's personality
died out in them. One by one they were stealing back into the
fold of national British art; the hand that had wound them up was
still. MacMaster despaired of them and confined himself more and
more exclusively to the studio, to such of Treffinger's letters
as were available--they were for the most part singularly negative
and colorless--and to his interrogation of Treffinger's man.
He could not himself have traced the successive steps
by which he was gradually admitted into James's confidence.
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: once, and this, while it is one, will never happen.
No.
Then the one cannot touch itself any more than it can be two?
It cannot.
Neither can it touch others.
Why not?
The reason is, that whatever is to touch another must be in separation
from, and next to, that which it is to touch, and no third thing can be
between them.
True.
Two things, then, at the least are necessary to make contact possible?
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