| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Young Forester by Zane Grey: That was Herky. His voice sounded glad. It roused a strange eagerness in
me; his rough greeting seemed to bring me back from a distance.
"All wet, but not burned none, I, see. We kinder was afeared. . . . Say,
kid, thet back-fire, now. It was a dandy. It did the biz. Our whiskers was
singed, but we're safe. An, kid, it was your game, played like a man
After that his voice grew faint, and I felt as if I were walking in a
dream.
XVIII. CONCLUSION
That dreadful feeling of motion went away, and I became unconscious of
everything. When I awoke the sun was gleaming dimly through thin films of
smoke. I was lying in a pleasant little ravine with stunted pines fringing
The Young Forester |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: "Everything else in the station was in a muddle--heads, things, buildings.
Strings of dusty niggers with splay feet arrived and departed; a stream
of manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads, and brass-wire set into
the depths of darkness, and in return came a precious trickle of ivory.
"I had to wait in the station for ten days--an eternity.
I lived in a hut in the yard, but to be out of the chaos
I would sometimes get into the accountant's office.
It was built of horizontal planks, and so badly put together that,
as he bent over his high desk, he was barred from neck
to heels with narrow strips of sunlight. There was no need
to open the big shutter to see. It was hot there, too;
Heart of Darkness |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: in my conjugal life, and to keep themselves at a distance. I
have compiled no statistics, but I know scores of cases--in
reality, they are innumerable--where they have killed, now a
child in its mother's womb, asserting positively that the mother
could not give birth to it (when the mother could give birth to
it very well), now mothers, under the pretext of a so-called
operation. No one has counted these murders, just as no one
counted the murders of the Inquisition, because it was supposed
that they were committed for the benefit of humanity.
Innumerable are the crimes of the doctors! But all these crimes
are nothing compared with the materialistic demoralization which
The Kreutzer Sonata |
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 Timaeus by Plato: longer-lived race which was worse, or a shorter-lived race which was
better, came to the conclusion that every one ought to prefer a shorter
span of life, which was better, to a longer one, which was worse; and
therefore they covered the head with thin bone, but not with flesh and
sinews, since it had no joints; and thus the head was added, having more
wisdom and sensation than the rest of the body, but also being in every man
far weaker. For these reasons and after this manner God placed the sinews
at the extremity of the head, in a circle round the neck, and glued them
together by the principle of likeness and fastened the extremities of the
jawbones to them below the face, and the other sinews he dispersed
throughout the body, fastening limb to limb. The framers of us framed the
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