| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: knack he had of various writing, and elaborately FORGED the
signature of Captain Flint, and the sailing directions of
Billy Bones. But somehow it was never TREASURE ISLAND to me.
I have said the map was the most of the plot. I might almost
say it was the whole. A few reminiscences of Poe, Defoe, and
Washington Irving, a copy of Johnson's BUCCANEERS, the name
of the Dead Man's Chest from Kingsley's AT LAST, some
recollections of canoeing on the high seas, and the map
itself, with its infinite, eloquent suggestion, made up the
whole of my materials. It is, perhaps, not often that a map
figures so largely in a tale, yet it is always important.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll: `Is that your invention too?'
The Knight looked down proudly at his helmet, which hung from
the saddle. `Yes,' he said, `but I've invented a better one than
that--like a sugar loaf. When I used to wear it, if I fell off
the horse, it always touched the ground directly. So I had a
VERY little way to fall, you see--But there WAS the danger of
falling INTO it, to be sure. That happened to me once--and the
worst of it was, before I could get out again, the other White
Knight came and put it on. He thought it was his own helmet.'
The knight looked so solemn about it that Alice did not dare to
laugh. `I'm afraid you must have hurt him,' she said in a
Through the Looking-Glass |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates by Howard Pyle: In the pleasurable warmth the heart feels in answer to tales of
derring- do Nelson's battles are all mightily interesting, but,
even in spite of their romance of splendid courage, I fancy that
the majority of us would rather turn back over the leaves of
history to read how Drake captured the Spanish treasure ship in
the South Sea, and of how he divided such a quantity of booty in
the Island of Plate (so named because of the tremendous dividend
there declared) that it had to be measured in quart bowls, being
too considerable to be counted.
Courage and daring, no matter how mad and ungodly, have always a
redundancy of vim and life to recommend them to the nether man
Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates |
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 God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: of as both good and evil. If it gives all the pain and conflict of
life, it gives also the joy of the sunshine, the delight and hope of
youth, the pleasures. If it has elaborated a hundred thousand sorts
of parasite, it has also moulded the beautiful limbs of man and
woman; it has shaped the slug and the flower. And in it, as part of
it, taking its rewards, responding to its goads, struggling against
the final abandonment to death, do we all live, as the beasts live,
glad, angry, sorry, revengeful, hopeful, weary, disgusted,
forgetful, lustful, happy, excited, bored, in pain, mood after mood
but always fearing death, with no certainty and no coherence within
us, until we find God. And God comes to us neither out of the stars
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