| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad: knows.
Monsieur George ought to have taken the very next train out of the
town but he yielded to the temptation to discover what had happened
to the house in the street of the Consuls after he and Dona Rita
had stolen out of it like two scared yet jubilant children. All he
discovered was a strange, fat woman, a sort of virago, who had,
apparently, been put in as a caretaker by the man of affairs. She
made some difficulties to admit that she had been in charge for the
last four months; ever since the person who was there before had
eloped with some Spaniard who had been lying in the house ill with
fever for more than six weeks. No, she never saw the person.
The Arrow of Gold |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: irrelevancies, solecisms, pleonasms, inconsistencies, awkwardnesses of
construction, wrong uses of words. They also contain historical blunders,
such as the statement respecting Hipparinus and Nysaeus, the nephews of
Dion, who are said to 'have been well inclined to philosophy, and well able
to dispose the mind of their brother Dionysius in the same course,' at a
time when they could not have been more than six or seven years of age--
also foolish allusions, such as the comparison of the Athenian empire to
the empire of Darius, which show a spirit very different from that of
Plato; and mistakes of fact, as e.g. about the Thirty Tyrants, whom the
writer of the letters seems to have confused with certain inferior
magistrates, making them in all fifty-one. These palpable errors and
|
