| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Fanny Herself by Edna Ferber: then the tricked reader is likely to go on to the very final
page, teased by the expectation that that which was hinted
at will be revealed.
Fanny Brandeis had a way of going to the public library on
Saturday afternoons (with a bag of very sticky peanut candy
in her pocket, the little sensualist!) and there, huddled in
a chair, dreamily and almost automatically munching peanut
brittle, her cheeks growing redder and redder in the close
air of the ill-ventilated room, she would read, and read,
and read. There was no one to censor her reading, so she
read promiscuously, wading gloriously through trash and
Fanny Herself |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare: GREMIO
HORTENSIO
Servants to Lucentio
TRANIO
BIONDELLO
Servants to Petruchio
GRUMIO
CURTIS
PEDANT, set up to personate Vincentio
Daughters to Baptista
KATHERINA, the shrew
The Taming of the Shrew |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: elicited from him. The first step in the process of teaching has made him
conscious of his own ignorance. He has had the 'torpedo's shock' given
him, and is the better for the operation. But whence had the uneducated
man this knowledge? He had never learnt geometry in this world; nor was it
born with him; he must therefore have had it when he was not a man. And as
he always either was or was not a man, he must have always had it.
(Compare Phaedo.)
After Socrates has given this specimen of the true nature of teaching, the
original question of the teachableness of virtue is renewed. Again he
professes a desire to know 'what virtue is' first. But he is willing to
argue the question, as mathematicians say, under an hypothesis. He will
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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 A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde: would not have given his rose for all the pearls on the canopy, nor
one white petal of his rose for the throne itself. What he wanted
was to see the Infanta before she went down to the pavilion, and to
ask her to come away with him when he had finished his dance.
Here, in the Palace, the air was close and heavy, but in the forest
the wind blew free, and the sunlight with wandering hands of gold
moved the tremulous leaves aside. There were flowers, too, in the
forest, not so splendid, perhaps, as the flowers in the garden, but
more sweetly scented for all that; hyacinths in early spring that
flooded with waving purple the cool glens, and grassy knolls;
yellow primroses that nestled in little clumps round the gnarled
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