| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Peter Pan by James M. Barrie: an opportunity, his wife felt, for telling him about the boy. At
first he pooh-poohed the story, but he became thoughtful when she
showed him the shadow.
"It is nobody I know," he said, examining it carefully, "but it
does look a scoundrel."
"We were still discussing it, you remember," says Mr. Darling,
"when Nana came in with Michael's medicine. You will never carry
the bottle in your mouth again, Nana, and it is all my fault."
Strong man though he was, there is no doubt that he had behaved
rather foolishly over the medicine. If he had a weakness, it was
for thinking that all his life he had taken medicine boldly, and
Peter Pan |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: you may judge him justly when you hear the story of this night.
I want you to look back, as he does every day, at his birth in
vice, his starved infancy; to remember the heavy years he has
groped through as boy and man,--the slow, heavy years of
constant, hot work. So long ago he began, that he thinks
sometimes he has worked there for ages. There is no hope that
it will ever end. Think that God put into this man's soul a
fierce thirst for beauty,--to know it, to create it; to
be--something, he knows not what,--other than he is. There are
moments when a passing cloud, the sun glinting on the purple
thistles, a kindly smile, a child's face, will rouse him to a
Life in the Iron-Mills |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: a shambling, primitive mammal, used sometimes for food and sometimes
as an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers, whose vaguely simian
and human foreshadowings were unmistakable. In the building of
land cities the huge stone blocks of the high towers were generally
lifted by vast-winged pterodactyls of a species heretofore unknown
to paleontology.
The persistence with which the Old Ones survived
various geologic changes and convulsions of the earth’s crust
was little short of miraculous. Though few or none of their first
cities seem to have remained beyond the Archaean Age, there was
no interruption in their civilization or in the transmission of
At the Mountains of Madness |
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 Euthydemus by Plato: him. This delighted Cleinias, whose laughter made Ctesippus ten times as
uproarious; but I cannot help thinking that the rogue must have picked up
this answer from them; for there has been no wisdom like theirs in our
time. Why do you laugh, Cleinias, I said, at such solemn and beautiful
things?
Why, Socrates, said Dionysodorus, did you ever see a beautiful thing?
Yes, Dionysodorus, I replied, I have seen many.
Were they other than the beautiful, or the same as the beautiful?
Now I was in a great quandary at having to answer this question, and I
thought that I was rightly served for having opened my mouth at all: I
said however, They are not the same as absolute beauty, but they have
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