| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Pathology of Lying, Etc. by William and Mary Healy: Sometimes I did it as a joke and sometimes I meant it. It is
hard sometimes to tell just what is the truth, I imagine things
so hard. I can remember lots that I've read.''
Amanda in several interviews went on at great length in a very
rational way, but altogether the gist of her view of her case is
to be found in the above. She told that she was a masturbator,
as might be supposed. She feels she can't help this and never
felt it was so particularly bad. Apparently it is a part of her
life of imagination at night. She insisted frequently on the
vividness of her mental content, and indeed was anxious to talk
about her peculiarities in this respect. It was very apparent
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson: of expectation, none that was mobile, none into which the rhythm and
poetry of life had entered. "O for a live face," he thought; and at
times he had a memory of Lady Flora; and at times he would study the
living gallery before him with despair, and would see himself go on to
waste his days in that joyless pastoral place, and death come to him,
and his grave be dug under the rowans, and the Spirit of the Earth laugh
out in a thunder-peal at the huge fiasco.
On this particular Sunday, there was no doubt but that the spring had
come at last. It was warm, with a latent shiver in the air that made
the warmth only the more welcome. The shallows of the stream glittered
and tinkled among bunches of primrose. Vagrant scents of the earth
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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 Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: silent, when it was enlivened with such a clatter of horse-shoes,
and such a rattle of musketry, and such a stir of talk; or why I
call those evenings solitary in which I gained so many friends. I
would rise from my book and pull the blind aside, and see the snow
and the glittering hollies chequer a Scotch garden, and the winter
moonlight brighten the white hills. Thence I would turn again to
that crowded and sunny field of life in which it was so easy to
forget myself, my cares, and my surroundings: a place busy as a
city, bright as a theatre, thronged with memorable faces, and
sounding with delightful speech. I carried the thread of that epic
into my slumbers, I woke with it unbroken, I rejoiced to plunge
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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 Somebody's Little Girl by Martha Young: Then Bessie Bell just let the lady draw her up close, and she leaned
up against the lady.
She felt so happy now, for she knew she had found the Wisest Woman
in the world, for this lady knew the things that little girls only
could remember. If she had thought about it she would have told the
lady about the tiny apple-trees with the very, very small apples on
them, and other rows of apple-trees over those, and other rows on
top of those, and on top of all a row of big round red apples.
Then the lady might have said: Yes, there were apple-trees like that
in the world, for all the nursery walls were papered like that, with
a row of big round red apples at the top.
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