| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy: and tenth verses about the occasions of stumbling, and that they
must come, and about punishment by casting men into hell fire,
and some kind of angels who see the face of the Father in Heaven.
"What a pity that this is so incoherent," he thought, "yet one
feels that there is something good in it."
"For the Son of Man came to save that which was lost," he
continued to read.
"How think ye? If any man have a hundred sheep and one of them go
astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine and go into the
mountains and seek that which goeth astray? And if so be that he
find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth over it more than
Resurrection |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: the sole purpose of hoaxing his superior.
The devil always puts a martyr near a Bixiou. Baudoyer's bureau held
the martyr, a poor copying-clerk twenty-two years of age, with a
salary of fifteen hundred francs, named Auguste-Jean-Francois Minard.
Minard had married for love the daughter of a porter, an artificial-
flower maker employed by Mademoiselle Godard. Zelie Lorrain, a pupil,
in the first place, of the Conservatoire, then by turns a danseuse, a
singer, and an actress, had thought of doing as so many of the
working-women do; but the fear of consequences kept her from vice. She
was floating undecidedly along, when Minard appeared upon the scene
with a definite proposal of marriage. Zelie earned five hundred francs
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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 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: presently I beheld a railing, then the house--scarce, by this dim
light, distinguishable from the trees; so dank and green were its
decaying walls. Entering a portal, fastened only by a latch, I
stood amidst a space of enclosed ground, from which the wood swept
away in a semicircle. There were no flowers, no garden-beds; only a
broad gravel-walk girdling a grass-plat, and this set in the heavy
frame of the forest. The house presented two pointed gables in its
front; the windows were latticed and narrow: the front door was
narrow too, one step led up to it. The whole looked, as the host of
the Rochester Arms had said, "quite a desolate spot." It was as
still as a church on a week-day: the pattering rain on the forest
Jane Eyre |
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 Golden Threshold by Sarojini Naidu: And first there was the wisdom of the East. I have never known
any one who seemed to exist on such "large draughts of
intellectual day" as this child of seventeen, to whom one could
tell all one's personal troubles and agitations, as to a wise old
woman. In the East, maturity comes early; and this child had
already lived through all a woman's life. But there was
something else, something hardly personal, something which
belonged to a consciousness older than the Christian, which I
realised, wondered at, and admired, in her passionate
tranquillity of mind, before which everything mean and trivial
and temporary caught fire and burnt away in smoke. Her body was
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