| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Love Songs by Sara Teasdale: Let our flight be far in sun or blowing rain --
*But what if I heard my first love calling me again?*
Hold me on your heart as the brave sea holds the foam,
Take me far away to the hills that hide your home;
Peace shall thatch the roof and love shall latch the door --
*But what if I heard my first love calling me once more?*
Dew
As dew leaves the cobweb lightly
Threaded with stars,
Scattering jewels on the fence
And the pasture bars;
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: They had been deafening us for the last hundred yards with
petitions for a sail; ay, and they deafened us to the same tune
next morning when we came to start; but then, when the canoes were
lying empty, there was no word of any such petition. Delicacy? or
perhaps a bit of fear for the water in so crank a vessel? I hate
cynicism a great deal worse than I do the devil; unless perhaps the
two were the same thing? And yet 'tis a good tonic; the cold tub
and bath-towel of the sentiments; and positively necessary to life
in cases of advanced sensibility.
From the boats they turned to my costume. They could not make
enough of my red sash; and my knife filled them with awe.
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from 1984 by George Orwell: in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for
the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place in one of the
middle rows when two people whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken
to, came unexpectedly into the room. One of them was a girl whom he often
passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that she
worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably--since he had sometimes seen
her with oily hands and carrying a spanner--she had some mechanical job
on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of
about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic
movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was
wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to
1984 |
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 Moby Dick by Herman Melville: about keeping a yellow warehouse on our starboard hand till we opened
a white church to the larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard
hand till we made a corner three points to the starboard, and that
done, then ask the first man we met where the place was: these
crooked directions of his very much puzzled us at first, especially
as, at the outset, Queequeg insisted that the yellow warehouse--our
first point of departure--must be left on the larboard hand, whereas
I had understood Peter Coffin to say it was on the starboard.
However, by dint of beating about a little in the dark, and now and
then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant to inquire the way, we at
last came to something which there was no mistaking.
Moby Dick |
