| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: four-year course of the Medical Schools. A day came when, on the
deck of a ship moored in Calcutta, I opened a letter telling me
of the end of an enviable existence. He had made for himself a
practice in some obscure little town of Austrian Galicia. And
the letter went on to tell me how all the bereaved poor of the
district, Christians and Jews alike, had mobbed the good doctor's
coffin with sobs and lamentations at the very gate of the
cemetery.
How short his years and how clear his vision! What greater
reward in ambition, honour, and conscience could he have hoped to
win for himself when, on the top of the Furca Pass, he bade me
A Personal Record |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Egmont by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe: beloved one; the lovely maiden arrayed herself in the celestial garb of my
friend. In a solemn moment they appeared united, with aspect more
earnest than tender. With bloodstained feet the vision approached, the
waving folds of her robe also were tinged with blood. It was my blood,
and the blood of many brave hearts. No! It shall not be shed in vain!
Forward! Brave people! The goddess of liberty leads you on! And as the
sea breaks through and destroys the barriers that would oppose its fury, so
do ye overwhelm the bulwark of tyranny, and with your impetuous flood
sweep it away from the land which it usurps. (Drums.)
Hark! Hark! How often has this sound summoned my joyous steps to the
field of battle and of victory! How bravely did I tread, with my gallant
Egmont |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: call by the name of poetry, is but a libertine and vagrant quality;
present, at times, in any art, more often absent from them all; too
seldom present in the prose novel, too frequently absent from the
ode and epic. Fiction is the same case; it is no substantive art,
but an element which enters largely into all the arts but
architecture. Homer, Wordsworth, Phidias, Hogarth, and Salvini,
all deal in fiction; and yet I do not suppose that either Hogarth
or Salvini, to mention but these two, entered in any degree into
the scope of Mr. Besant's interesting lecture or Mr. James's
charming essay. The art of fiction, then, regarded as a
definition, is both too ample and too scanty. Let me suggest
|
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 Shadow out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft: which somehow seemed oddly unhuman.
These markings were mostly
in the respective languages of the various books, all of which
the writer seemed to know with equal, though obviously academic,
facility. One note appended to von Junzt's Unaussprechlichen Kulten,
however, was alarmingly otherwise. It consisted of certain curvilinear
hieroglyphs in the same ink as that of the German corrections,
but following no recognized human pattern. And these hieroglyphs
were closely and unmistakably aldn to the characters constantly
met with in my dreams - characters whose meaning I would sometimes
momentarily fancy I knew, or was just on the brink of recalling.
Shadow out of Time |
