| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Oedipus Trilogy by Sophocles: I found thee in Cithaeron's wooded glens.
OEDIPUS
What led thee to explore those upland glades?
MESSENGER
My business was to tend the mountain flocks.
OEDIPUS
A vagrant shepherd journeying for hire?
MESSENGER
True, but thy savior in that hour, my son.
OEDIPUS
My savior? from what harm? what ailed me then?
Oedipus Trilogy |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from 1984 by George Orwell: to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at
tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been
vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. There was a
certain fitness in this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple
of years earlier. And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy
creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent
for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled
versions--definitive texts, they were called--of poems which had become
ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another were to be
retained in the anthologies. And this hall, with its fifty workers or
thereabouts, was only one sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the
1984 |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne: manners, was declining. - Every nation, continued he, have their
refinements and GROSSIERTES, in which they take the lead, and lose
it of one another by turns: - that he had been in most countries,
but never in one where he found not some delicacies, which others
seemed to want. LE POUR ET LE CONTRE SE TROUVENT EN CHAQUE NATION;
there is a balance, said he, of good and bad everywhere; and
nothing but the knowing it is so, can emancipate one half of the
world from the prepossession which it holds against the other: -
that the advantage of travel, as it regarded the SCAVOIR VIVRE, was
by seeing a great deal both of men and manners; it taught us mutual
toleration; and mutual toleration, concluded he, making me a bow,
|
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 Brother of Daphne by Dornford Yates: "Don't know about the palm in particular," he said, after a
while, "but being so much with the 'orses it do tend to- "
"That'll do," I said hurriedly. "Lo, here is a crown, by the
vulgar erroneously denominated a 'dollar'. Take it, and drink
the lady's health before you go to bed."
He took the coins greedily, and touched his hat. Then he
partially undressed, in the traditional fashion, and put them
away, apparently in a wallet next to his skin.
I turned to the girl.
"We'll go in, shall we?" I said. "They'll give us some food, even
if they do want to paint us. And we can ring up your people. I
The Brother of Daphne |
