| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: Pekin and you in Greenland."
"The will of two lovers can rise victorious over all things," said
Lucien, lowering his eyes.
"You will forget us," returned the alarmed lover, as Eve's fair face
rose before his mind.
"On the contrary, I have perhaps sacrificed my love to you," cried
Lucien.
"What do you mean?"
"In spite of my love, in spite of the different motives which bid me
obtain a secure footing in her house, I have told her that I will
never go thither again unless another is made welcome too, a man whose
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Tapestried Chamber by Walter Scott: ground between them. A hundred terrible objects appeared to
haunt me; but there was the great difference betwixt the vision
which I have described, and those which followed, that I knew the
last to be deceptions of my own fancy and over-excited nerves.
"Day at last appeared, and I rose from my bed ill in health and
humiliated in mind. I was ashamed of myself as a man and a
soldier, and still more so at feeling my own extreme desire to
escape from the haunted apartment, which, however, conquered all
other considerations; so that, huddling on my clothes with the
most careless haste, I made my escape from your lordship's
mansion, to seek in the open air some relief to my nervous
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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 The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more
impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures,
there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of
production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication,
draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation.
The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with
which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the
barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to
capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to
adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to
The Communist Manifesto |
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 The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: put everything in its place, and then went into the izba (room),
but found no one there.
The men had not yet returned from their work in the field and the
women had gone to look for the cattle, so that all about the
place was quiet. Going into the room, Ivan seated himself on a
wooden bench and soon became lost in thought. He remembered how,
when Gavryl first heard the sentence which had been passed upon
him, he grew very pale, and turned his face to the wall, all the
while remaining silent.
Ivan's heart ached when he thought of the disgrace which he had
been the means of bring- ing upon Gavryl, and he wondered how he
The Kreutzer Sonata |
