Air of the air

Meaning

The air of the air names the spirit or breath of the world-word received through breathing. It is an inward or effective power associated with ordinary air in the narrator’s physiology, not simply a redundant repetition. That breath nourishes human spirits and contributes to the dissolving power of digestion. The phrase should remain within the proposed world–human relation; translating it directly as oxygen or another modern constituent would add a chemical identification absent from the source.