| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Marie by H. Rider Haggard: tell you these things, which you may like to know.
"Oh, why did God ever put it into my father's heart to leave the Cape
Colony just because he hated the British Government and Hernan Pereira
and others persuaded him? I know not, but, poor man, he is sorry enough
now. It is pitiful to see him; at times I think that he is going mad.
"The paper is done, and the messenger is going; also the sick child is
dying and I must attend to her. Will this letter ever come to your
hands, I wonder? I am sending with it the little money I have to pay
for its delivery--about four pounds English. If not, there is an end.
If it does, and you cannot come or send others, at least pray for us. I
dream of you by night and think of you by day, for how much I love you I
Marie |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner: cultivate. They are nicely adapted machines for experimenting on the
question, 'Into how little space a human soul can be crushed?' I have seen
some souls so compressed that they would have fitted into a small thimble,
and found room to move there--wide room. A woman who has been for many
years in one of those places carries the mark of the beast on her till she
dies, though she may expand a little afterward, when she breathes in the
free world."
"Were you miserable?" he asked, looking at her with quick anxiety.
"I?--no. I am never miserable and never happy. I wish I were. But I
should have run away from the place on the fourth day, and hired myself to
the first Boer-woman whose farm I came to, to make fire under her soap-pot,
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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 Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might
stain your cheek with shame--"
"Stop!" faltered Dorian Gray, "stop! you bewilder me.
I don't know what to say. There is some answer to you, but I
cannot find it. Don't speak. Let me think. Or, rather, let me
try not to think."
For nearly ten minutes he stood there, motionless, with parted
lips and eyes strangely bright. He was dimly conscious
that entirely fresh influences were at work within him.
Yet they seemed to him to have come really from himself.
The few words that Basil's friend had said to him--words spoken
The Picture of Dorian Gray |
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 Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: graceful blue shadows all about him. He had sketched an outline
of them on the margin of his notepaper. The subtleties of Arabic
decoration had cast an unholy spell over him, and the brutal
exaggerations of Gothic art were a bad dream, easily forgotten.
The Alhambra itself had, from the first, seemed perfectly
familiar to him, and he knew that he must have trod that court,
sleek and brown and obsequious, centuries before Ferdinand rode
into Andalusia. The letter was full of confidences about his
work, and delicate allusions to their old happy days of study and
comradeship, and of her own work, still so warmly remembered and
appreciatively discussed everywhere he went.
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
