| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: 'and when I call to him he will not stir.'
How strange, said Agathon; then you must call him again, and keep calling
him.
Let him alone, said my informant; he has a way of stopping anywhere and
losing himself without any reason. I believe that he will soon appear; do
not therefore disturb him.
Well, if you think so, I will leave him, said Agathon. And then, turning
to the servants, he added, 'Let us have supper without waiting for him.
Serve up whatever you please, for there is no one to give you orders;
hitherto I have never left you to yourselves. But on this occasion imagine
that you are our hosts, and that I and the company are your guests; treat
|
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 Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad: more fair than other people. I would have been harsh. My very
admiration was making me more angry. It's ridiculous to say of a
man got up in correct tailor clothes, but there was a funereal
grace in his attitude so that he might have been reproduced in
marble on a monument to some woman in one of those atrocious Campo
Santos: the bourgeois conception of an aristocratic mourning
lover. When I came to that conclusion I became glad that I was
angry or else I would have laughed right out before him."
"I have heard a woman say once, a woman of the people - do you hear
me, Dona Rita? - therefore deserving your attention, that one
should never laugh at love."
 The Arrow of Gold |