| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer, Detective by Mark Twain: and lifted the old man up and got him into his chair,
and Benny petted him and kissed him and tried to comfort him,
and poor old Aunt Sally she done the same; but, poor things,
they was so broke up and scared and knocked out of their
right minds that they didn't hardly know what they
was about. With Tom it was awful; it 'most petrified
him to think maybe he had got his uncle into a thousand
times more trouble than ever, and maybe it wouldn't ever
happened if he hadn't been so ambitious to get celebrated,
and let the corpse alone the way the others done.
But pretty soon he sort of come to himself again and says:
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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 Call of the Wild by Jack London: scrambling for the bread and bacon. The clubs fell upon them
unheeded. They yelped and howled under the rain of blows, but
struggled none the less madly till the last crumb had been
devoured.
In the meantime the astonished team-dogs had burst out of their
nests only to be set upon by the fierce invaders. Never had Buck
seen such dogs. it seemed as though their bones would burst
through their skins. They were mere skeletons, draped loosely in
draggled hides, with blazing eyes and slavered fangs. But the
hunger-madness made them terrifying, irresistible. There was no
opposing them. The team-dogs were swept back against the cliff at
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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 Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy: was to become a laundress or not did not occur to Katusha,
either. She looked with pity at the thin, hard-worked
laundresses, some already in consumption, who stood washing or
ironing with their thin arms in the fearfully hot front room,
which was always full of soapy steam and draughts from the
windows, and thought with horror that she might have shared the
same fate.
Katusha had begun to smoke some time before, and since the young
shopman had thrown her up she was getting more and more into the
habit of drinking. It was not so much the flavour of wine that
tempted her as the fact that it gave her a chance of forgetting
Resurrection |
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 Gambara by Honore de Balzac: "Here he is!" said Giardini, in an undertone, clutching the Count's
arm and nodding to a tall man. "How pale and grave he is poor man! His
hobby has not trotted to his mind to-day, I fancy."
Andrea's prepossession for Marianna was crossed by the captivating
charm which Gambara could not fail to exert over every genuine artist.
The composer was now forty; but although his high brow was bald and
lined with a few parallel, but not deep, wrinkles; in spite, too, of
hollow temples where the blue veins showed through the smooth,
transparent skin, and of the deep sockets in which his black eyes were
sunk, with their large lids and light lashes, the lower part of his
face made him still look young, so calm was its outline, so soft the
Gambara |
