| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Golden Threshold by Sarojini Naidu: tell all one's personal troubles and agitations, as to a wise old
woman. In the East, maturity comes early; and this child had
already lived through all a woman's life. But there was
something else, something hardly personal, something which
belonged to a consciousness older than the Christian, which I
realised, wondered at, and admired, in her passionate
tranquillity of mind, before which everything mean and trivial
and temporary caught fire and burnt away in smoke. Her body was
never without suffering, or her heart without conflict; but
neither the body's weakness nor the heart's violence could
disturb that fixed contemplation, as of Buddha on his
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: There are immeasurable differences between the gregarious man and the
man who lives closest to nature. Toussaint Louverture, after he was
caught, died without speaking a word. Napoleon, transplanted to a
rock, talked like a magpie--he wanted to account for himself. Z.
Marcas erred in the same way, but for our benefit only. Silence in all
its majesty is to be found only in the savage. There is never a
criminal who, though he might let his secrets fall with his head into
the basket of sawdust does not feel the purely social impulse to tell
them to somebody.
Nay, I am wrong. We have seen one Iroquois of the Faubourg Saint-
Marceau who raised the Parisian to the level of the natural savage--a
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: where they really are, as they gaze lazily around at earth and sea
and sky, and have
"No speculation in those eyes
Which they do glare withal"?
Why not, then, try to discover a few of the Wonders of the Shore?
For wonders there are there around you at every step, stranger than
ever opium-eater dreamed, and yet to be seen at no greater expense
than a very little time and trouble.
Perhaps you smile, in answer, at the notion of becoming a
"Naturalist:" and yet you cannot deny that there must be a
fascination in the study of Natural History, though what it is is
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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 Art of War by Sun Tzu: B.C.). A genuine work. See SHIH CHI, ch. 65.
2. SSU-MA FA, in 1 CHUAN or 5 chapters. Wrongly attributed
to Ssu-ma Jang-chu of the 6th century B.C. Its date, however,
must be early, as the customs of the three ancient dynasties are
constantly to be met within its pages. See SHIH CHI, ch. 64.
The SSU K`U CH`UAN SHU (ch. 99, f. 1) remarks that the
oldest three treatises on war, SUN TZU, WU TZU and SSU-MA FA,
are, generally speaking, only concerned with things strictly
military -- the art of producing, collecting, training and
drilling troops, and the correct theory with regard to measures
of expediency, laying plans, transport of goods and the handling
The Art of War |
