| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson: That burns, and must burn somehow for the best.
The Tavern
Whenever I go by there nowadays
And look at the rank weeds and the strange grass,
The torn blue curtains and the broken glass,
I seem to be afraid of the old place;
And something stiffens up and down my face,
For all the world as if I saw the ghost
Of old Ham Amory, the murdered host,
With his dead eyes turned on me all aglaze.
The Tavern has a story, but no man
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from On Revenues by Xenophon: [25] See "Mem." II. viii. 1, for an illustrative case.
Let it be granted, however, that at first a nucleus of twelve hundred
slaves is formed. It is hardly too sanguine a supposition that out of
the profits alone,[26] within five or six years this number may be
increased to at least six thousand. Again, out of that number of six
thousand--supposing each slave to being in an obol a day clear of all
expenses--we get a revenue of sixty talents a year. And supposing
twenty talents out of this sum laid out on the purchase of more
slaves, there will be forty talents left for the state to apply to any
other purpose it may find advisable. By the time the round number[27]
of ten thousand is reached the yearly income will amount to a hundred
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: his body seemed to fall away from him into nothingness. With a single
glance this strange being led him in spirit through the spheres where
meditation leads the learned man, prayer the pious heart, where vision
transports the artist, and sleep the souls of men,--each and all have
their own path to the Height, their own guide to reach it, their own
individual sufferings in the dire return. In that sphere alone all
veils are rent away, and the revelation, the awful flaming certainty
of an unknown world, of which the soul brings back mere fragments to
this lower sphere, stands revealed. To Wilfrid one hour passed with
Seraphita was like the sought-for dreams of Theriakis, in which each
knot of nerves becomes the centre of a radiating delight. But he left
Seraphita |
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: stolen, and hated as only the disappointed strugglers in a
bitter, dead little Western town know how to do, what have we got
to show for it? Harvey Merrick wouldn't have given one sunset
over your marshes for all you've got put together, and you know
it. It's not for me to say why, in the inscrutable wisdom of
God, a genius should ever have been called from this place of
hatred and bitter waters; but I want this Boston man to know that
the drivel he's been hearing here tonight is the only tribute any
truly great man could ever have from such a lot of sick, side-
tracked, burnt-dog, land-poor sharks as the here-present
financiers of Sand City--upon which town may God have mercy!"
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
