| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: perhaps, they will realise how and in what spirit they should
approach me. . . .
The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than
we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a
misfortune, a casuality, something that calls for sympathy in
others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is 'in
trouble' simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the
expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it. With people of
our own rank it is different. With us, prison makes a man a
pariah. I, and such as I am, have hardly any right to air and sun.
Our presence taints the pleasures of others. We are unwelcome when
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Koran: those who misbelieve; who took their religion for a sport and a
play; whom the life of the world beguiled.'- To-day do we forget
them as they forgot the meeting of this day, and for that they did
deny our signs!
Now we have brought them a book explaining it in knowledge, a
guidance and a mercy to a people who believe.
Do they wait now for aught but its interpretation?- on the day
when its interpretation shall come, those who forgot it before will
say, 'There did come to us the apostles of our Lord in truth, have
we intercessors to intercede for us? or, could we return, we would
do otherwise than we did.' They have lost themselves, and that which
The Koran |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells: house door between them, with some of their household goods
piled thereon. One man told us he meant to try to get away
from Shepperton station.
There was a lot of shouting, and one man was even jesting.
The idea people seemed to have here was that the Martians
were simply formidable human beings, who might attack and
sack the town, to be certainly destroyed in the end. Every
now and then people would glance nervously across the Wey,
at the meadows towards Chertsey, but everything over there
was still.
Across the Thames, except just where the boats landed,
War of the Worlds |
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 Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: hearing, of the projection of sound, things that bridge space; the
miracles of memory and reason, by which the present is conceived,
and when it is gone, its image kept living in the brains of man and
brute; the miracle of reproduction, with its imperious desires and
staggering consequences. And to put the last touch upon this
mountain mass of the revolting and the inconceivable, all these
prey upon each other, lives tearing other lives in pieces, cramming
them inside themselves, and by that summary process, growing fat:
the vegetarian, the whale, perhaps the tree, not less than the lion
of the desert; for the vegetarian is only the eater of the dumb.
Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with predatory life, and more
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