| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Memorabilia by Xenophon: conjunction with moderate exercise was a system he favoured, as
tending to a healthy condition of the body without trammelling the
cultivation of the spirit. On the other hand, there was nothing
dandified or pretentious about him; he indulged in no foppery of shawl
or shoes, or other effeminacy of living.
[1] See [Plat.] "Erast." 132 C.
Least of all did he tend to make his companions greedy of money. He
would not, while restraining passion generally, make capital out of
the one passion which attached others to himself; and by this
abstinence, he believed, he was best consulting his own freedom; in so
much that he stigmatised those who condescended to take wages for
The Memorabilia |
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 Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: definite answer, and one could not but feel that he disliked such
questions and was rather offended by them.
In those remote days about which I am talking, my father was
very keen about the management of his estate, and devoted a lot
of energy to it. I can remember his planting the huge apple
orchard at Yásnaya and several hundred acres of birch and
pine forest, and at the beginning of the seventies, for a number
of years, he was interested in buying up land cheap in the
province of Samara, and breeding droves of steppe horses and
flocks of sheep.
I still have pretty clear, though rather fragmentary and
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