| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Tao Teh King by Lao-tze: Will work but ill, and disappointment bring.
Misery!--happiness is to be found by its side! Happiness!--misery
lurks beneath it! Who knows what either will come to in the end?
2. Shall we then dispense with correction? The (method of) correction
shall by a turn become distortion, and the good in it shall by a turn
become evil. The delusion of the people (on this point) has indeed
subsisted for a long time.
3. Therefore the sage is (like) a square which cuts no one (with its
angles); (like) a corner which injures no one (with its sharpness).
He is straightforward, but allows himself no license; he is bright,
but does not dazzle.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: place to camp in. This was not easy to find; the terraces were too
narrow, and the ground, where it was unterraced, was usually too
steep for a man to lie upon. I should have slipped all night, and
awakened towards morning with my feet or my head in the river.
After perhaps a mile, I saw, some sixty feet above the road, a
little plateau large enough to hold my sack, and securely parapeted
by the trunk of an aged and enormous chestnut. Thither, with
infinite trouble, I goaded and kicked the reluctant Modestine, and
there I hastened to unload her. There was only room for myself
upon the plateau, and I had to go nearly as high again before I
found so much as standing-room for the ass. It was on a heap of
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