| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac: "Oh! you sly little girl, haven't you any confidence in me?"
"Then, sire, set the young nobleman at liberty."
"So! he is a nobleman, is he?" cried the king. "Then he is not an
apprentice?"
"He is certainly innocent," she said.
"I don't see it so," said the king, coldly. "I am the law and justice
of my kingdom, and I must punish evil-doers."
"Come, don't put on that solemn face of yours! Give me the life of
that young man."
"Is it yours already?"
"Sire," she said, "I am pure and virtuous. You are jesting at--"
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: "A great difference?"
"Those things she had put on."
"Oh the glasses--in her beauty? She looked queer of course, but it
was partly because one was unaccustomed. There are women who look
charming in nippers. What, at any rate, if she does look queer?
She must be mad not to accept that alternative."
"She IS mad," said Geoffrey Dawling.
"Mad to refuse you, I grant. Besides," I went on, "the pince-nez,
which was a large and peculiar one, was all awry: she had half
pulled it off, but it continued to stick, and she was crimson, she
was angry."
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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 Time Machine by H. G. Wells: there were none.
`I must confess that my satisfaction with my first theories of
an automatic civilization and a decadent humanity did not long
endure. Yet I could think of no other. Let me put my
difficulties. The several big palaces I had explored were mere
living places, great dining-halls and sleeping apartments. I
could find no machinery, no appliances of any kind. Yet these
people were clothed in pleasant fabrics that must at times need
renewal, and their sandals, though undecorated, were fairly
complex specimens of metalwork. Somehow such things must be
made. And the little people displayed no vestige of a creative
The Time Machine |
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 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth--the strange commingling
of desire and hate. And it is not my own extremity I remember best--
a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain,
and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things--even of this
pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through.
True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge,
while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot.
And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom,
and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that
inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold
of the invisible. Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up would not
Heart of Darkness |
