| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Under the Andes by Rex Stout: dozen of our modern skeptical scientists in this cave with me for
about five minutes."
"But what is it? A reptile!" Harry exclaimed. "The thing is
as big as a house!"
"Well, and why not? I should guess that it is about thirty
feet in height and forty or fifty in length. There have been
species, now extinct, several times as large."
"Then you think it is just--just an animal?" put in Desiree.
"What did you think it was?" I nearly smiled. "An infernal
machine?"
"I don't know. Only I have never before known what it was to
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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 International Episode by Henry James: Belgrave Square. On one side was an enormous hotel, lifting up into
the hot darkness an immense array of open, brightly lighted windows.
At the base of this populous structure was an eternal jangle of horsecars,
and all round it, in the upper dusk, was a sinister hum of mosquitoes.
The ground floor of the hotel seemed to be a huge transparent cage,
flinging a wide glare of gaslight into the street, of which it formed a sort
of public adjunct, absorbing and emitting the passersby promiscuously.
The young Englishmen went in with everyone else, from curiosity, and saw
a couple of hundred men sitting on divans along a great marble-paved corridor,
with their legs stretched out, together with several dozen more standing
in a queue, as at the ticket office of a railway station, before a
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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: Party, you understand.'
Winston had the feeling that they were talking at cross-purposes.
'What I really wanted to know was this,' he said. 'Do you feel that you
have more freedom now than you had in those days? Are you treated more
like a human being? In the old days, the rich people, the people at the
top----'
'The 'Ouse of Lords,' put in the old man reminiscently.
'The House of Lords, if you like. What I am asking is, were these people
able to treat you as an inferior, simply because they were rich and you
were poor? Is it a fact, for instance, that you had to call them "Sir" and
take off your cap when you passed them?'
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 Poems by Bronte Sisters: Certain, and free from mortal fears.
"Seek now thy couch, and lie till morn,
Then from thy chamber, calm, descend,
With mind nor tossed, nor anguish-torn,
But tranquil, fixed, to wait the end.
"And when thy opening eyes shall see
Mementos, on the chamber wall,
Of one who has forgotten thee,
Shed not the tear of acrid gall.
"The tear which, welling from the heart,
Burns where its drop corrosive falls,
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