| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Tao Teh King by Lao-tze: And weakness marks the course
Of Tao's mighty deeds.
2. All things under heaven sprang from It as existing (and named);
that existence sprang from It as non-existent (and not named).
41. 1. Scholars of the highest class, when they hear about the Tao,
earnestly carry it into practice. Scholars of the middle class, when
they have heard about it, seem now to keep it and now to lose it.
Scholars of the lowest class, when they have heard about it, laugh
greatly at it. If it were not (thus) laughed at, it would not be fit
to be the Tao.
2. Therefore the sentence-makers have thus expressed themselves:--
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: my cousin, a delightful quick-tempered little girl, some months
younger than myself, whose life, lovingly watched over, as if she
were a royal princess, came to an end with her fifteenth year.
There were other children, too, many of whom are dead now, and
not a few whose very names I have forgotten. Over all this hung
the oppressive shadow of the great Russian Empire--the shadow
lowering with the darkness of a new-born national hatred fostered
by the Moscow school of journalists against the Poles after the
ill-omened rising of 1863.
This is a far cry back from the MS. of "Almayer's Folly," but the
public record of these formative impressions is not the whim of
Some Reminiscences |
