| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Almayer's Folly by Joseph Conrad: He looked into her eyes eagerly for a minute and let her go with
a sigh, then lying down in the canoe he put his head on her
knees, gazing upwards and stretching his arms backwards till his
hands met round the girl's waist. She bent over him, and,
shaking her head, framed both their faces in the falling locks of
her long black hair.
And so they drifted on, he speaking with all the rude eloquence
of a savage nature giving itself up without restraint to an
overmastering passion, she bending low to catch the murmur of
words sweeter to her than life itself. To those two nothing
existed then outside the gunwales of the narrow and fragile
Almayer's Folly |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: had effaced all tracks which could have supplied any plausible
theory. Scattered bits of clothing, roughly slashed from the human
incision subjects, hinted no clues. It is useless to bring up
the half impression of certain faint snow prints in one shielded
corner of the ruined inclosure - because that impression did not
concern human prints at all, but was clearly mixed up with all
the talk of fossil prints which poor Lake had been giving throughout
the preceding weeks. One had to be careful of one’s imagination
in the lee of those overshadowing mountains of madness.
As I
have indicated, Gedney and one dog turned out to be missing in
At the Mountains of Madness |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: their motives with a subtlety and delicacy of perception which
surprised and delighted me. It showed the refinement of his moral
nature. But, at the same time, it rendered his minor degree of
interest in the other episodes of the story, those which had a more
direct and overpowering appeal to the heart, a greater paradox.
Human nature is troubled in the presence of all mystery which has
not by long familiarity lost its power of soliciting attention; and
for my own part, I have always been uneasy in the presence of moral
problems. Puzzled by the contradictions which I noticed in
Bourgonef, I tried to discover whether he had any general
repugnance to stories of crimes, or any special repugnance to
|
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 Hamlet by William Shakespeare: That she should locke her selfe from his Resort,
Admit no Messengers, receiue no Tokens:
Which done, she tooke the Fruites of my Aduice,
And he repulsed. A short Tale to make,
Fell into a Sadnesse, then into a Fast,
Thence to a Watch, thence into a Weaknesse,
Thence to a Lightnesse, and by this declension
Into the Madnesse whereon now he raues,
And all we waile for
King. Do you thinke 'tis this?
Qu. It may be very likely
Hamlet |
