| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Philosophy 4 by Owen Wister: least. Life burned strong in him. There were sly times when he took
what he had saved by his cheap meals and room and went to Boston with
it, and for a few hours thoroughly ceased being ascetic. Yet Oscar felt
meritorious when he considered Bertie and Billy; for, like the
socialists, merit with him meant not being able to live as well as your
neighbor. You will think that I have given to Oscar what is familiarly
termed a black eye. But I was once inclined to applaud his struggle for
knowledge, until I studied him close and perceived that his love was not
for the education he was getting. Bertie and Billy loved play for
play's own sake, and in play forgot themselves, like the wholesome young
creatures that they were. Oscar had one love only: through all his days
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: fibres?
YOUNG SOCRATES: What do you mean?
STRANGER: I mean the work of the carder's art; for we cannot say that
carding is weaving, or that the carder is a weaver.
YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly not.
STRANGER: Again, if a person were to say that the art of making the warp
and the woof was the art of weaving, he would say what was paradoxical and
false.
YOUNG SOCRATES: To be sure.
STRANGER: Shall we say that the whole art of the fuller or of the mender
has nothing to do with the care and treatment of clothes, or are we to
Statesman |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: sea, cloud, and sky brought purposely together to assemble outwardly
the scattered parts of the vision within. In those mirrors, the minds
of men, in those pools of uneasy water, in which clouds for ever turn
and shadows form, dreams persisted, and it was impossible to resist the
strange intimation which every gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and
the white earth itself seemed to declare (but if questioned at once to
withdraw) that good triumphs, happiness prevails, order rules; or to
resist the extraordinary stimulus to range hither and thither in search
of some absolute good, some crystal of intensity, remote from the known
pleasures and familiar virtues, something alien to the processes of
domestic life, single, hard, bright, like a diamond in the sand, which
To the Lighthouse |
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 Little Britain by Washington Irving: impossible," so long as England is true to herself, that anything
can shake her; and he has much to say on the subject of the
national debt, which, somehow or other, he proves to be a
great national bulwark and blessing. He passed the greater part
of his life in the purlieus of Little Britain, until of late
years,
when, having become rich, and grown into the dignity of a
Sunday cane, he begins to take his pleasure and see the world.
He has therefore made several excursions to Hampstead,
Highgate, and other neighboring towns, where he has passed
whole afternoons in looking back upon the metropolis through
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