| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from One Basket by Edna Ferber: should think you'd stay home once in a while and not be runnin'
the streets every night."
"Time enough to be sittin' home when I'm old like you."
And yet between these two there was love, and even understanding.
But in families such as Tessie's, demonstration is a thing to be
ashamed of; affection a thing to conceal. Tessie's father was
janitor of the Chippewa High School. A powerful man, slightly
crippled by rheumatism, loquacious, lively, fond of his family,
proud of his neat gray frame house and his new cement sidewalk
and his carefully tended yard and garden patch. In all her life
Tessie had never seen a caress exchanged between her parents.
One Basket |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Summer by Edith Wharton: duties. But that is not the only way of coming back to
North Dormer. Some of us, who went out from here in
our youth...went out, like you, to busy cities and
larger duties...have come back in another way--come
back for good. I am one of those, as many of you
know...." He paused, and there was a sense of suspense
in the listening hall. "My history is without
interest, but it has its lesson: not so much for those
of you who have already made your lives in other
places, as for the young men who are perhaps
planning even now to leave these quiet hills and go
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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 On Revenues by Xenophon: to the eyes of all of us, and as to what belongs to past history, if
we are to believe the testimony of our fathers,[10] things were then
much of a piece with what is going on now. No, what is really
marvellous is that the state, with the fact of so many private persons
growing wealthy at her expense, and under her very eyes, should have
failed to imitate them. It is an old story, trite enough to those of
us who have cared to attend to it, how once on a time Nicias, the son
of Niceratus, owned a thousand men in the silver mines,[11] whom he
let out to Sosias, a Thracian, on the following terms. Sosias was to
pay him a net obol a day, without charge or deduction, for every slave
of the thousand, and be[12] responsible for keeping up the number
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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 The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: the necessary perpetuity of suffering, and explain the creative
part which it plays. We would wage war upon false optimism; on
the base hope of happiness coming to us ready made; on the notion
of a salvation by knowledge alone, or by material civilization
alone, vain symbol as this is of civilization, precarious
external arrangement ill-fitted to replace the intimate union and
consent of souls. We would wage war also on bad morals, whether
in public or in private life; on luxury, fastidiousness, and
over-refinement, on all that tends to increase the painful,
immoral, and anti-social multiplications of our wants; on all
that excites envy and dislike in the soul of the common people,
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