| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: murder of a mouse in an air pump, or the examination of a cobweb
by the microscope, or some similar nonsense, with which he was
constantly in the habit of pestering his intimates. But without
waiting for a reply, Dr. Heidegger hobbled across the chamber,
and returned with the same ponderous folio, bound in black
leather, which common report affirmed to be a book of magic.
Undoing the silver clasps, he opened the volume, and took from
among its black-letter pages a rose, or what was once a rose,
though now the green leaves and crimson petals had assumed one
brownish hue, and the ancient flower seemed ready to crumble to
dust in the doctor's hands.
Twice Told Tales |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from An Unsocial Socialist by George Bernard Shaw: battery with the knocker, followed by a sound, confused by the
gale, as of a man shouting, interrupted her.
"They had better not open the door," said Miss Wilson, in some
alarm. "You are very imprudent, Agatha, to stand here. You will
catch your death of--Dear me! What can be the matter? She hurried
down, followed by Agatha, Gertrude, and some of the braver
students, to the hall, where they found a few shivering servants
watching the housekeeper, who was at the keyhole of the house
door, querulously asking who was there. She was evidently not
heard by those without, for the knocking recommenced whilst she
was speaking, and she recoiled as if she had received a blow on
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: stupidity! Every virtue inclines to stupidity, every stupidity to
virtue; "stupid to the point of sanctity," they say in Russia,--
let us be careful lest out of pure honesty we eventually become
saints and bores! Is not life a hundred times too short for us--
to bore ourselves? One would have to believe in eternal life in
order to ....
228. I hope to be forgiven for discovering that all moral
philosophy hitherto has been tedious and has belonged to the
soporific appliances--and that "virtue," in my opinion, has been
MORE injured by the TEDIOUSNESS of its advocates than by anything
else; at the same time, however, I would not wish to overlook
Beyond Good and Evil |
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 Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: From whence you come I cannot guess unless you be descended
from the slaves the Torquasians captured in early times when
they reduced the outer world to their vassalage; but we had
heard that they destroyed all other races but their own."
Carthoris tried to explain that the Torquasians ruled
but a relatively tiny part of the surface of Barsoom, and
even this only because their domain held nothing to attract
the red race; but the Lotharian could not seem to
conceive of anything beyond the valley of Lothar other
than a trackless waste peopled by the ferocious green
hordes of Torquas.
Thuvia, Maid of Mars |
