| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Droll Stories, V. 1 by Honore de Balzac: ecclesiastical bowels, and believed him happy. Then the surgeon rose
quickly, as if to take note of the tapestries and count the rafters,
but gained the door before anyone else, and relaxing his sphincter in
advance, he hummed a tune on his way to the retreat; arrived there he
was compelled, like La Balue, to murmur words of excuse to this
student of perpetual motion, shutting the door with as promptitude as
he opened it; and he came back burdened with an accumulation which
seriously impeded his private channels. And in the same way went to
guests one after the other, without being able to unburden themselves
of their sauces, as soon again found themselves all in the presence of
Louis the Eleventh, as much distressed as before, looking at each
Droll Stories, V. 1 |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln: who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power
to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember,
what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished
work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining
before us. . .that from these honored dead we take increased devotion
to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. . .
that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. . .
that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. . .
and that government of the people. . .by the people. . .for the people. . .
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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 People That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs: particular geometric figure, I at once grasped its appropriateness.
We were now in the country of the Band-lu, the spearmen of Caspak.
Bowen had remarked in his narrative that these people were
analogous to the so-called Cro-Magnon race of the Upper
Paleolithic, and I was therefore very anxious to see them.
Nor was I to be disappointed; I saw them, all right! We had left
the Sto-lu country and literally fought our way through cordons
of wild beasts for two days when we decided to make camp a
little earlier than usual, owing to the fact that we had
reached a line of cliffs running east and west in which were
numerous likely cave-lodgings. We were both very tired, and
The People That Time Forgot |
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 Middlemarch by George Eliot: and the radiance seemed to light up all his future with mild sunshine.
Ideal happiness (of the kind known in the Arabian Nights, in which you
are invited to step from the labor and discord of the street into
a paradise where everything is given to you and nothing claimed)
seemed to be an affair of a few weeks' waiting, more or less.
"Why should we defer it?" he said, with ardent insistence.
"I have taken the house now: everything else can soon be got ready--
can it not? You will not mind about new clothes. Those can be
bought afterwards."
"What original notions you clever men have!" said Rosamond, dimpling with
more thorough laughter than usual at this humorous incongruity.
Middlemarch |
