| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: slater on the slope of a neighbouring roof eyed me curiously.
A lean black cat, looking as if it had battened on strange
meats, slipped past me. A little boy at a window put his
finger to his nose in so offensive a manner that I was put
upon my dignity, and turned grandly off to read old epitaphs
and peer through the gratings into the shadow of vaults.
Just then I saw two women coming down a path, one of them
old, and the other younger, with a child in her arms. Both
had faces eaten with famine and hardened with sin, and both
had reached that stage of degradation, much lower in a woman
than a man, when all care for dress is lost. As they came
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: ships among men of strange speech, and even then Aegisthus
planned that pitiful work at home. And for seven years he
ruled over Mycenae, rich in gold, after he slew the son of
Atreus, and the people were subdued unto him. But in the
eighth year came upon him goodly Orestes back from Athens
to be his bane, and slew the slayer of his father, guileful
Aegisthus, who killed his famous sire. Now when he had
slain him, he made a funeral feast to the Argives over his
hateful mother, and over the craven Aegisthus. And on the
selfsame day there came to him Menelaus of the loud
war-cry, bringing much treasure, even all the freight of
The Odyssey |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: ourselves? And what the spirit that leads us wants TO BE CALLED?
(It is a question of names.) And how many spirits we harbour? Our
honesty, we free spirits--let us be careful lest it become our
vanity, our ornament and ostentation, our limitation, our
stupidity! Every virtue inclines to stupidity, every stupidity to
virtue; "stupid to the point of sanctity," they say in Russia,--
let us be careful lest out of pure honesty we eventually become
saints and bores! Is not life a hundred times too short for us--
to bore ourselves? One would have to believe in eternal life in
order to ....
228. I hope to be forgiven for discovering that all moral
Beyond Good and Evil |
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 Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot: dialogue with the Sphere, certain remarks which have a bearing
on the point in question, and which he had previously omitted
as being tedious and unnecessary.]
On this point the defence of the Square seems to me to be impregnable.
I wish I could say that his answer to the second (or moral) objection
was equally clear and cogent. It has been objected that he is
a woman-hater; and as this objection has been vehemently urged
by those whom Nature's decree has constituted the somewhat larger half
of the Spaceland race, I should like to remove it, so far as I can
honestly do so. But the Square is so unaccustomed to the use
of the moral terminology of Spaceland that I should be doing him
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions |
