| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov: hate every one."
"Perhaps so. I don't know," I said.
"Please go away. You want to go on at me till the morning, but I
warn you I am quite worn out and cannot answer you. You promised
me to go to town. I am very grateful; I ask nothing more."
My wife wanted me to go away, but it was not easy for me to do
that. I was dispirited and I dreaded the big, cheerless, chill
rooms that I was so weary of. Sometimes when I had an ache or a
pain as a child, I used to huddle up to my mother or my nurse,
and when I hid my face in the warm folds of their dress, it
seemed to me as though I were hiding from the pain. And in the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Passionate Pilgrim by William Shakespeare: And blushing fled, and left her all alone.
X.
Sweet rose, fair flower, untimely pluck'd, soon vaded,
Pluck'd in the bud, and vaded in the spring!
Bright orient pearl, alack, too timely shaded!
Fair creature, kill'd too soon by death's sharp sting!
Like a green plum that hangs upon a tree,
And falls, through wind, before the fall should he.
I weep for thee, and yet no cause I have;
For why thou left'st me nothing in thy will:
And yet thou left'st me more than I did crave;
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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 Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed by Edna Ferber: righted it. He stopped the machine at the road-side.
"Careful, Kindchen," he said, gravely.
"Ernst," I said, and my breath came quickly,
chokingly, as though I had been running fast, "Ernst, I
can't do it. I'm not big enough. I can't. I hate him,
I tell you, I hate him! My life is my own. I've made it
what it is, in the face of a hundred temptations; in
spite of a hundred pitfalls. I can't lay it down again
for Peter Orme to trample. Ernst, if you love me, take
me away now. To Vienna--anywhere--only don't ask me to
take up my life with him again. I can't--I can't--"
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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 Time Machine by H. G. Wells: Upper-world people for the dark. I wondered vaguely what foul
villainy it might be that the Morlocks did under the new moon. I
felt pretty sure now that my second hypothesis was all wrong.
The Upper-world people might once have been the favoured
aristocracy, and the Morlocks their mechanical servants: but
that had long since passed away. The two species that had
resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down towards, or
had already arrived at, an altogether new relationship. The Eloi,
like the Carolingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful
futility. They still possessed the earth on sufferance: since
the Morlocks, subterranean for innumerable generations, had come
The Time Machine |
