| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from 1984 by George Orwell: face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled
to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that
smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories. He seemed to see a vision of
London, vast and ruinous, city of a million dustbins, and mixed up with it
was a picture of Mrs Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair,
fiddling helplessly with a blocked waste-pipe.
He reached down and scratched his ankle again. Day and night the
telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today
had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations--that they
lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger,
happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of fifty years
1984 |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: of lover and avoid the other, and therefore encourages some to pursue, and
others to fly; testing both the lover and beloved in contests and trials,
until they show to which of the two classes they respectively belong. And
this is the reason why, in the first place, a hasty attachment is held to
be dishonourable, because time is the true test of this as of most other
things; and secondly there is a dishonour in being overcome by the love of
money, or of wealth, or of political power, whether a man is frightened
into surrender by the loss of them, or, having experienced the benefits of
money and political corruption, is unable to rise above the seductions of
them. For none of these things are of a permanent or lasting nature; not
to mention that no generous friendship ever sprang from them. There
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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 An Episode Under the Terror by Honore de Balzac: ordinary dress of the time, was standing on the threshold of the shop
--which stood between Saint Roch and the Rue des Frondeurs--when he
saw that the Rue Saint Honore was filled with a crowd and he could not
go out.
"What is the matter?" he asked Madame Ragon.
"Nothing," she said; "it is only the tumbril cart and the executioner
going to the Place Louis XV. Ah! we used to see it often enough last
year; but to-day, four days after the anniversary of the twenty-first
of January, one does not feel sorry to see the ghastly procession."
"Why not?" asked the abbe. "That is not said like a Christian."
"Eh! but it is the execution of Robespierre's accomplices. They
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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 Whirligigs by O. Henry: I've sent to the livery stable to engage Fly and Bess for
the buckboard; they stand fire so nicely. I was sure you
would go."
They were to be married in the fall. The glamour was
at its height. The plovers won the day -- or, rather, the
afternoon -- over the calf-bound authorities. Littlefield
began to put his papers away.
There was a knock at the door. Kilpatrick answered
it. A beautiful, dark-eyed girl with a skin tinged with
the faintest lemon colour walked into the room. A black
shawl was thrown over her head and wound once around
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