| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain: But his enjoyment was brief. He stared a considerable time
at the three strips, and seemed stupefied with astonishment.
At last he put them down and said, "I can't make it out at all--
hang it, the baby's don't tally with the others!"
He walked the floor for half an hour puzzling over his enigma,
then he hunted out the other glass plates.
He sat down and puzzled over these things a good while,
but kept muttering, "It's no use; I can't understand it.
They don't tally right, and yet I'll swear the names and dates are right,
and so of course they OUGHT to tally. I never labeled one of
these thing carelessly in my life. There is a most extraordinary
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad: often in men's affairs unexpectedly--even irration-
ally--illuminating moments when an otherwise in-
significant sound, perhaps only some perfectly com-
monplace gesture, suffices to reveal to us all the
unreason, all the fatuous unreason, of our compla-
cency. "Go ahead" are not particularly striking
words even when pronounced with a foreign accent;
yet they petrified me in the very act of smiling at
myself in the glass. And then, refusing to believe
my ears, but already boiling with indignation, I
ran out of the cabin and up on deck.
 Falk |