| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: your pen perhaps would have been stayed.
Your sect (and remember, as far as any sect avows me, it is mine)
has not done ill in a worldly sense in the Hawaiian Kingdom. When
calamity befell their innocent parishioners, when leprosy descended
and took root in the Eight Islands, a QUID PRO QUO was to be looked
for. To that prosperous mission, and to you, as one of its
adornments, God had sent at last an opportunity. I know I am
touching here upon a nerve acutely sensitive. I know that others
of your colleagues look back on the inertia of your Church, and the
intrusive and decisive heroism of Damien, with something almost to
be called remorse. I am sure it is so with yourself; I am
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Options by O. Henry: then some,' was the way they sang it. And the old party lines drawn
by Sherman's march and the Kuklux and nine-cent cotton and the Jim
Crow street-car ordinances faded away. We became one undivided.
country, with no North, very little East, a good-sized chunk of West,
and a South that loomed up as big as the first foreign label on a new
eight-dollar suit-case.
"Of course the dogs of war weren't a complete pack without a yelp from
the San Augustine Rifles, Company D, of the Fourteenth Texas Regiment.
Our company was among the first to land in Cuba and strike terror into
the hearts of the foe. I'm not going to give you a history of the
war, I'm just dragging it in to fill out my story about Willie
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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: we were the night of her wedding, when, pale and covered with
tears, she fled from her husband, her whole body trembling,
saying that for nothing in the world would she tell what he
wanted of her.
"You say natural? It is natural to eat; that is a pleasant,
agreeable function, which no one is ashamed to perform from the
time of his birth. No, it is not natural. A pure young girl
wants one thing,--children. Children, yes, not a lover." . . .
"But," said I, with astonishment, "how would the human race
continue?"
"But what is the use of its continuing?" he rejoined,
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 Intentions by Oscar Wilde: are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the
Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any
existence? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at
all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious
creation of certain individual artists. If you set a picture by
Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a
real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the
slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in
Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to
say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or
extraordinary about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure
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