| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft: cause of death. The professor had been stricken whilst returning
from the Newport boat; falling suddenly; as witnesses said, after
having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from
one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which
formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased's home
in Williams Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible
disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure
lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a
hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end. At the
time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly
I am inclined to wonder - and more than wonder.
 Call of Cthulhu |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: SOCRATES: I fancy to myself Heracleitus repeating wise traditions of
antiquity as old as the days of Cronos and Rhea, and of which Homer also
spoke.
HERMOGENES: How do you mean?
SOCRATES: Heracleitus is supposed to say that all things are in motion and
nothing at rest; he compares them to the stream of a river, and says that
you cannot go into the same water twice.
HERMOGENES: That is true.
SOCRATES: Well, then, how can we avoid inferring that he who gave the
names of Cronos and Rhea to the ancestors of the Gods, agreed pretty much
in the doctrine of Heracleitus? Is the giving of the names of streams to
|