| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: putting nonsense into other nations' heads, and stirring them up to
revolt. In short, we cleared a way through all these mobs of nations;
for wherever the Emperor appeared, we made a passage for him; for on
the land as on the sea, whenever he said, 'I wish to go forward,' we
made the way.
"There comes a final end to it at last. We are back in France; and in
spite of the bitter weather, it did one's heart good to breathe one's
native air again, it set up many a poor fellow; and as for me, it put
new life into me, I can tell you. But it was a question all at once of
defending France, our fair land of France. All Europe was up in arms
against us; they took it in bad part that we had tried to keep the
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: is dangerous to jest with laughter." "Everything that I laughed at
became sad." "And terrible," adds Merejkovsky. But earlier his humour
was lighter, less tinged with the tragic; in those days Pushkin never
failed to be amused by what Gogol had brought to read to him. Even
Revizor (1835), with its tragic undercurrent, was a trifle compared
to Dead Souls, so that one is not astonished to hear that not only
did the Tsar, Nicholas I, give permission to have it acted, in spite
of its being a criticism of official rottenness, but laughed
uproariously, and led the applause. Moreover, he gave Gogol a grant of
money, and asked that its source should not be revealed to the author
lest "he might feel obliged to write from the official point of view."
Dead Souls |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft: the loungers at Osborn's that more carpentry was going on in the
Whateley farmhouse. Wilbur was closing all the doors and windows
on the ground floor, and seemed to be taking out partitions as
he and his grandfather had done upstairs four years before. He
was living in one of the sheds, and Sawyer thought he seemed unusually
worried and tremulous. People generally suspected him of knowing
something about his mother disappearance, and very few ever approached
his neighbourhood now. His height had increased to more than seven
feet, and showed no signs of ceasing its development.
V.
The
The Dunwich Horror |
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 Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: out on a branch and call, "Come along, Little Brother," and at
first Mowgli would cling like the sloth, but afterward he would
fling himself through the branches almost as boldly as the gray
ape. He took his place at the Council Rock, too, when the Pack
met, and there he discovered that if he stared hard at any wolf,
the wolf would be forced to drop his eyes, and so he used to stare
for fun. At other times he would pick the long thorns out of the
pads of his friends, for wolves suffer terribly from thorns and
burs in their coats. He would go down the hillside into the
cultivated lands by night, and look very curiously at the
villagers in their huts, but he had a mistrust of men because
The Jungle Book |
