| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being
monopolised, i.e., from the moment when individual property can
no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital,
from that moment, you say individuality vanishes.
You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no
other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of
property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and
made impossible.
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the
products
of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to
The Communist Manifesto |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from An Unsocial Socialist by George Bernard Shaw: right in any misunderstanding between them. She had a slovenly
way of summing up as "asses" people whose habits of thought
differed from hers. Of all varieties of man, the minor poet
realized her conception of the human ass most completely, and
Erskine, though a very nice fellow indeed, thoroughly good and
gentlemanly, in her opinion, was yet a minor poet, and therefore
a pronounced ass. Trefusis, on the contrary, was the last man of
her acquaintance whom she would have thought of as a very nice
fellow or a virtuous gentleman; but he was not an a~s, although
he was obstinate in his Socialistic fads. She had indeed
suspected him of weakness almost asinine with respect to
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: enormous Columbiad, pointed perpendicularly to the horizon,
would have framed the moon in the mouth of the gun. A straight
line drawn through the axis of the piece would have passed
through the center of the orb of night. It is needless to say,
that during the night of the 5th-6th of December, the travelers
took not an instant's rest. Could they close their eyes when so
near this new world? No! All their feelings were concentrated
in one single thought:-- See! Representatives of the earth, of
humanity, past and present, all centered in them! It is through
their eyes that the human race look at these lunar regions, and
penetrate the secrets of their satellite! A strange emotion
From the Earth to the Moon |
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 Within the Tides by Joseph Conrad: the grey hillside something moving, which he made out to be a
little man in a yellow hat mounted on a mule - that mule without
which the fate of Tom Corbin would have remained mysterious for
ever.
June, 1913.
BECAUSE OF THE DOLLARS
CHAPTER I
While we were hanging about near the water's edge, as sailors
idling ashore will do (it was in the open space before the Harbour
Office of a great Eastern port), a man came towards us from the
"front" of business houses, aiming obliquely at the landing steps.
Within the Tides |
