| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells: dimensions particularly--why not another direction at right
angles to the other three?--and have even tried to construct a
Four-Dimension geometry. Professor Simon Newcomb was expounding
this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago.
You know how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions,
we can represent a figure of a three-dimensional solid, and
similarly they think that by models of thee dimensions they could
represent one of four--if they could master the perspective of
the thing. See?'
`I think so,' murmured the Provincial Mayor; and, knitting his
brows, he lapsed into an introspective state, his lips moving as
The Time Machine |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Emma McChesney & Co. by Edna Ferber: triumphant example of Woman in Business.
It was at this comfortable stage of Featherloom affairs that the
Movement struck the T. A. Buck Company. Emma McChesney Buck had
never mingled much in movements. Not that she lacked sympathy
with them; she often approved of them, heart and soul. But she
had been heard to say that the Movers got on her nerves. Those
well-dressed, glib, staccato ladies who spoke with such ease from
platforms and whose pictures stared out at one from the woman's
page failed, somehow, to convince her. When Emma approved a new
movement, it was generally in spite of them, never because of
them. She was brazenly unapologetic when she said that she would
Emma McChesney & Co. |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: supposing I were to be seized with an unnatural craving to go there.
All the labourers who work here from March to December
are Russians and Poles, or a mixture of both. We send a man
over who can speak their language, to fetch as many as he can
early in the year, and they arrive with their bundles,
men and women and babies, and as soon as they have got
here and had their fares paid, they disappear in the night
if they get the chance, sometimes fifty of them at a time,
to go and work singly or in couples for the peasants,
who pay them a pfenning or two more a day than we do,
and let them eat with the family. From us they get a mark
Elizabeth and her German Garden |
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 Songs of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: XXXIII - TO MY WIFE (A Fragment)
LONG must elapse ere you behold again
Green forest frame the entry of the lane -
The wild lane with the bramble and the brier,
The year-old cart-tracks perfect in the mire,
The wayside smoke, perchance, the dwarfish huts,
And ramblers' donkey drinking from the ruts: -
Long ere you trace how deviously it leads,
Back from man's chimneys and the bleating meads
To the woodland shadow, to the sylvan hush,
When but the brooklet chuckles in the brush -
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