| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Tik-Tok of Oz by L. Frank Baum: The Princess sighed and handed the Magnet
to the Shaggy Man.
"What shall I do?" she asked sorrowfully.
"Turn her out, Gardener, with the others!"
commanded the Roses. "We will have no Ruler until
a man-rose--a King--is ripe enough to pick."
"Very well," said the Gardener meekly. "You must
excuse me, my dear Shaggy, for opposing your
wishes, but you and the others, including Ozga,
must get out of Rose Kingdom immediately, if not
before."
Tik-Tok of Oz |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Octopus by Frank Norris: "Damn the dog and the girl and the whole rotten business--and
now," he exclaimed, as a sudden fancied qualm arose in his
stomach, "now, it's all made me sick. Might have known it. Oh,
it only lacked that to wind up the whole day. Let her go, I
don't care, and the sooner the better."
He countermanded the supper and went to bed before it was dark,
lighting his lamp, on the chair near the head of the bed, and
opening his "Copperfield" at the place marked by the strip of
paper torn from the bag of prunes. For upward of an hour he read
the novel, methodically swallowing one prune every time he
reached the bottom of a page. About nine o'clock he blew out the
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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 The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: sad. One can live there a hundred years without being noticed,
and be dead a long time before anybody will notice it. People
have no time to inquire into your life. All are absorbed.
Business, social relations, art, the health of children, their
education. And there are visits that must be received and made;
it is necessary to see this one, it is necessary to hear that one
or the other one. In the city there are always one, two, or
three celebrities that it is indispensable that one should visit.
Now one must care for himself, or care for such or such a little
one, now it is the professor, the private tutor, the governesses,
. . . and life is absolutely empty. In this activity we were
The Kreutzer Sonata |
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 Road to Oz by L. Frank Baum: in the middle of it and blowing kisses from her fingers to those below.
The bubble took a southerly direction, quickly floating out of sight.
"That's a very nice way to travel," said Princess Fluff. "I'd like to
go home in a bubble, too."
So the Wizard blew a big bubble around Princess Fluff, and another
around King Bud, her brother, and a third one around Queen Zixi; and
soon these three bubbles had mounted into the sky and were floating
off in a group in the direction of the kingdom of Noland.
The success of these ventures induced the other guests from foreign
lands to undertake bubble journeys, also; so the Wizard put them one
by one inside his bubbles, and Santa Claus directed the way they
The Road to Oz |
