| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from McTeague by Frank Norris: significance was not for him. To reason with it was beyond
him. He could only oppose to it an instinctive stubborn
resistance, blind, inert.
McTeague went on with his work. As he was rapping in the
little blocks and cylinders with the mallet, Trina slowly
came back to herself with a long sigh. She still felt a
little confused, and lay quiet in the chair. There was a
long silence, broken only by the uneven tapping of the
hardwood mallet. By and by she said, "I never felt a
thing," and then she smiled at him very prettily beneath the
rubber dam. McTeague turned to her suddenly, his mallet in
McTeague |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Adventure by Jack London: skin smooth, well oiled, and free from disease. On his chest,
suspended from a single string of porpoise-teeth around his throat,
hung a big crescent carved out of opalescent pearl-shell. A row of
pure white cowrie shells banded his brow. From his hair drooped a
long, lone feather. Above the swelling calf of one leg he wore, as
a garter, a single string of white beads. The effect was dandyish
in the extreme. A narrow gee-string completed his costume.
Another man she saw, old and shrivelled, with puckered forehead and
a puckered face that trembled and worked with animal passion as in
the past she had noticed the faces of monkeys tremble and work.
"Gogoomy," she said sharply, "you no cut 'm grass, my word, I bang
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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 Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman by Thomas Hardy: threadbare old propositions; how I could have been so
fired by poor Parson Clare's enthusiasm, and have gone
so madly to work, transcending even him, I cannot make
out! As for what you said last time, on the strength of
your wonderful husband's intelligence--whose name you
have never told me--about having what they call an
ethical system without any dogma, I don't see my way to
that at all."
"Why, you can have the religion of loving-kindness and
purity at least, if you can't have--what do you call
it--dogma."
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman |
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 Phaedo by Plato: drinking; and so he arrived at the conclusion that he was not meant for
such enquiries. Nor was he less perplexed with notions of comparison and
number. At first he had imagined himself to understand differences of
greater and less, and to know that ten is two more than eight, and the
like. But now those very notions appeared to him to contain a
contradiction. For how can one be divided into two? Or two be compounded
into one? These are difficulties which Socrates cannot answer. Of
generation and destruction he knows nothing. But he has a confused notion
of another method in which matters of this sort are to be investigated.
(Compare Republic; Charm.)
Then he heard some one reading out of a book of Anaxagoras, that mind is
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