| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: what you want to do.' 'Oh, if you were only dead!' I cried.
"I remember how that terrible phrase frightened me. Never had I
thought that I could utter words so brutal, so frightful, and I
was stupefied at what had just escaped my lips. I fled into my
private apartment. I sat down and began to smoke. I heard her
go into the hall and prepare to go out. I asked her: 'Where are
you going? She did not answer. 'Well, may the devil take you!'
said I to myself, going back into my private room, where I lay
down again and began smoking afresh. Thousands of plans of
vengeance, of ways of getting rid of her, and how to arrange
this, and act as if nothing had happened,--all this passed
The Kreutzer Sonata |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: upon the Hellenes, and therefore justice requires that we should also make
mention of those who crowned the previous work of our salvation, and drove
and purged away all barbarians from the sea. These were the men who fought
by sea at the river Eurymedon, and who went on the expedition to Cyprus,
and who sailed to Egypt and divers other places; and they should be
gratefully remembered by us, because they compelled the king in fear for
himself to look to his own safety instead of plotting the destruction of
Hellas.
And so the war against the barbarians was fought out to the end by the
whole city on their own behalf, and on behalf of their countrymen. There
was peace, and our city was held in honour; and then, as prosperity makes
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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 Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan: her!' This was quite a fortnight later, and Mrs. Innes still
occupied her remarkable position only in her own mind and
Madeline's, still knowing herself the wife of 1596 and of 1596 only,
and still unaware that 1596 was in his grave. Simla had gone on
with its dances and dinners and gymkhanas quite as if no crucial
experience were hanging over the heads of three of the people one
met 'everywhere,' and the three people continued to be met
everywhere, although only one of them was unconscious. The women
tried to avoid each other without accenting it, exchanging light
words only as occasion demanded, but they were not clever enough for
Mrs. Gammidge and Mrs. Mickie, who went about saying that Mrs.
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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 Turn of the Screw by Henry James: up the staircase where Quint had so hungrily hovered for him,
along the lobby where I had listened and trembled, and so to
his forsaken room.
Not a sound, on the way, had passed between us, and I had wondered--
oh, HOW I had wondered!--if he were groping about in his
little mind for something plausible and not too grotesque.
It would tax his invention, certainly, and I felt, this time,
over his real embarrassment, a curious thrill of triumph.
It was a sharp trap for the inscrutable! He couldn't play any
longer at innocence; so how the deuce would he get out of it?
There beat in me indeed, with the passionate throb of this
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