| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield: it's as though, in the silence, somebody called your name, and you heard
your name for the first time. "Beryl!"
"Yes, I'm here. I'm Beryl. Who wants me?"
"Beryl!"
"Let me come."
It is lonely living by oneself. Of course, there are relations, friends,
heaps of them; but that's not what she means. She wants some one who will
find the Beryl they none of them know, who will expect her to be that Beryl
always. She wants a lover.
"Take me away from all these other people, my love. Let us go far away.
Let us live our life, all new, all ours, from the very beginning. Let us
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: Great was our distress.
"No tobacco!" said the Doctor.
"No cloak!" said the Keeper of the Seals.
"Ah, you rascals, you would dress as the postillion de Longjumeau, you
would appear as Debardeurs, sup in the morning, and breakfast at night
at Very's--sometimes even at the /Rocher de Cancale/.--Dry bread for
you, my boys! Why," said I, in a big bass voice, "you deserve to sleep
under the bed, you are not worthy to lie in it--"
"Yes, yes; but, Keeper of the Seals, there is no more tobacco!" said
Juste.
"It is high time to write home, to our aunts, our mothers, and our
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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 Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: wise than they would be if they gave up study, who, not contented with
knowing all that is intelligibly explained in their author, desire in
addition to find in him the solution of many difficulties of which he says
not a word, and never perhaps so much as thought. Their fashion of
philosophizing, however, is well suited to persons whose abilities fall
below mediocrity; for the obscurity of the distinctions and principles of
which they make use enables them to speak of all things with as much
confidence as if they really knew them, and to defend all that they say on
any subject against the most subtle and skillful, without its being
possible for any one to convict them of error. In this they seem to me to
be like a blind man, who, in order to fight on equal terms with a person
Reason Discourse |
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 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: good enough for ME; and wherever I run across it, it
can have all of MY custom every time.
Well, that night we had OUR show; but there warn't
only about twelve people there -- just enough to pay
expenses. And they laughed all the time, and that
made the duke mad; and everybody left, anyway,
before the show was over, but one boy which was
asleep. So the duke said these Arkansaw lunkheads
couldn't come up to Shakespeare; what they wanted
was low comedy -- and maybe something ruther worse
than low comedy, he reckoned. He said he could
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn |
