| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Herodias by Gustave Flaubert: rainbow. Her lips were tinted a deep crimson, her arched eyebrows were
black as jet, her glowing eyes had an almost terrible radiance; and
the tiny drops of perspiration on her forehead looked like dew upon
white marble.
She made no sound; and the burning gaze of that multitude of men was
concentrated upon her.
A sound like the snapping of fingers came from the gallery over the
pavilion. Instantly, with one of her movements of bird-like swiftness,
Salome stood erect. The next moment she rapidly passed up a flight of
steps leading to the gallery, and coming to the front of it she leaned
over, smiled upon the tetrarch, and, with an air of almost childlike
Herodias |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: slightly puffy. He seemed prosperous, extremely married and unromantic; and
altogether unromantic appeared this sleeping-porch, which looked on one
sizable elm, two respectable grass-plots, a cement driveway, and a corrugated
iron garage. Yet Babbitt was again dreaming of the fairy child, a dream more
romantic than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea.
For years the fairy child had come to him. Where others saw but Georgie
Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth. She waited for him, in the darkness
beyond mysterious groves. When at last he could slip away from the crowded
house he darted to her. His wife, his clamoring friends, sought to follow,
but he escaped, the girl fleet beside him, and they crouched together on a
shadowy hillside. She was so slim, so white, so eager! She cried that he was
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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 Second Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed
no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration
which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause
of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself
should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less
fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray
to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other.
It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's
assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces;
but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both
Second Inaugural Address |
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 Gambara by Honore de Balzac: already conscious of an unwillingness to expose so noble and pathetic
a mania as a spectacle for so much vulgar shrewdness. It was with no
base reservation that he kept up a desultory conversation, in the
course of which Signor Giardini's nose not infrequently interposed
between two remarks. Whenever Gambara uttered some elegant repartee or
some paradoxical aphorism, the cook put his head forward, to glance
with pity at the musician and with meaning at the Count, muttering in
his ear, "/E matto/!"
Then came a moment when the /chef/ interrupted the flow of his
judicial observations to devote himself to the second course, which he
considered highly important. During his absence, which was brief,
Gambara |
