| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: and sung out it couldn't be done at the money. Much they
cared! there was the land, that was all they knew; and they
turned to and drove the boat slap ashore in the thick of it, and
was all drowned but one. No; boat trips are my eye,"
concluded the captain, gloomily.
The tone was surprising in a man of his indomitable temper.
"Come, Captain," said Carthew, "you have something else up
your sleeve; out with it!"
"It's a fact," admitted Wicks. "You see there's a raft of little
bally reefs about here, kind of chicken-pox on the chart. Well,
I looked 'em all up, and there's one--Midway or Brooks they
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: THEAETETUS: I do not as yet understand you.
SOCRATES: Then I will try to explain myself: just now we asked the
question, whether a man who had learned and remembered could fail to know,
and we showed that a person who had seen might remember when he had his
eyes shut and could not see, and then he would at the same time remember
and not know. But this was an impossibility. And so the Protagorean fable
came to nought, and yours also, who maintained that knowledge is the same
as perception.
THEAETETUS: True.
SOCRATES: And yet, my friend, I rather suspect that the result would have
been different if Protagoras, who was the father of the first of the two
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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 At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: more and more amphibious, more and more imitative! Great God!
What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use
and carve such things?
And now, when Danforth and I saw the
freshly glistening and reflectively iridescent black slime which
clung thickly to those headless bodies and stank obscenely with
that new, unknown odor whose cause only a diseased fancy could
envisage - clung to those bodies and sparkled less voluminously
on a smooth part of the accursedly resculptured wall in a series
of grouped dots - we understood the quality of cosmic fear to
its uttermost depths. It was not fear of those four missing others
At the Mountains of Madness |
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 Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: and said smiling:--
"You see a great deal, don't you, of the Princesse de Cadignan?"
To this question d'Arthez responded by curtly nodding his head. Maxime
de Trailles was a "bravo" of the social order, without faith or law,
capable of everything, ruining the women who trusted him, compelling
them to pawn their diamonds to give him money, but covering this
conduct with a brilliant varnish; a man of charming manners and
satanic mind. He inspired all who knew him with equal contempt and
fear; but as no one was bold enough to show him any sentiments but
those of the utmost courtesy he saw nothing of this public opinion, or
else he accepted and shared the general dissimulation. He owed to the
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