| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot: Section 17. How the Sphere, having in vain tried words,
resorted to deeds
It was in vain. I brought my hardest right angle into violent
collision with the Stranger, pressing on him with a force sufficient
to have destroyed any ordinary Circle: but I could feel him
slowly and unarrestably slipping from my contact; no edging to
the right nor to the left, but moving somehow out of the world,
and vanishing to nothing. Soon there was a blank. But still I heard
the Intruder's voice.
SPHERE. Why will you refuse to listen to reason?
I had hoped to find in you -- as being a man of sense
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Common Sense by Thomas Paine: before they could attack us, and the same distance to return
in order to refit and recruit. And although Britain, by her fleet,
hath a check over our trade to Europe, we have as large a one over her trade
to the West Indies, which, by laying in the neighbourhood of the continent,
is entirely at its mercy.
Some method might be fallen on to keep up a naval force in time of peace,
if we should not judge it necessary to support a constant navy.
If premiums were to be given to merchants, to build and employ in their
service ships mounted with twenty, thirty, forty or fifty guns,
(the premiums to be in proportion to the loss of bulk to the merchants)
fifty or sixty of those ships, with a few guardships on constant duty,
Common Sense |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Dracula by Bram Stoker: It is not only that he feels sorrow, deep sorrow, for the dear,
good man who has befriended him all his life, and now at
the end has treated him like his own son and left him a fortune
which to people of our modest bringing up is wealth beyond
the dream of avarice, but Jonathan feels it on another account.
He says the amount of responsibility which it puts upon him makes
him nervous. He begins to doubt himself. I try to cheer him up,
and my belief in him helps him to have a belief in himself.
But it is here that the grave shock that he experienced tells upon
him the most. Oh, it is too hard that a sweet, simple, noble,
strong nature such as his, a nature which enabled him by our dear,
Dracula |
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 Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: forehead, at a gun stuck in deep mud, and that was before the
Afghan War of 1842, and he had not then come to his full strength.
His mother Radha Pyari,--Radha the darling,--who had been
caught in the same drive with Kala Nag, told him, before his
little milk tusks had dropped out, that elephants who were afraid
always got hurt. Kala Nag knew that that advice was good, for the
first time that he saw a shell burst he backed, screaming, into a
stand of piled rifles, and the bayonets pricked him in all his
softest places. So, before he was twenty-five, he gave up being
afraid, and so he was the best-loved and the best-looked-after
elephant in the service of the Government of India. He had
The Jungle Book |
