| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield: bullying the waitresses, who ran about continually with glasses of beer,
trays of cups and saucers, and bottles of wine.
"Up the stairs--up the stairs!" boomed the landlord. "Leave your coats on
the landing."
Herr Brechenmacher, completely overawed by this grand manner, so far forgot
his rights as a husband as to beg his wife's pardon for jostling her
against the banisters in his efforts to get ahead of everybody else.
Herr Brechenmacher's colleagues greeted him with acclamation as he entered
the door of the Festsaal, and the Frau straightened her brooch and folded
her hands, assuming the air of dignity becoming to the wife of a postman
and the mother of five children. Beautiful indeed was the Festsaal. Three
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Cruise of the Jasper B. by Don Marquis: wigs or obvious tricks of that sort.
But if Wilton Barnstable were to walk into a convention of
blacksmiths, let us say, he would quite escape attention. For
before he had been ten minutes in that gathering he would become,
to all appearances, the typical blacksmith. If he were to enter
a gathering of bankers, or barbers, or bakers, or organ grinders,
or stockbrokers, or school-teachers, a similar thing would
happen. He could make himself the composite photograph of all
the individuals of any group. He disguised himself from the
inside out.
This art of becoming inconspicuous was one of his greatest assets
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Lin McLean by Owen Wister: body folded and sank with him, pulling him to his knees. While he took
breath so, the mutter went on, and through the door came the jigging
fiddle. A fire of desperation lighted in his eyes. "Buffalo Girls!" he
shouted, hoarsely, in her ear, and got once more on his feet with her as
though they were two partners in a quadrille. Still shouting her to wake,
he struck a tottering sort of step, and so, with the bending load in his
grip, strove feebly to dance the laudanum away.
Feet stumbled across the porch, and Lusk was in the room. "So I've got
you!" he said. He had no weapon, but made a dive under the bed and came
up with a carbine. The two men locked, wrenching impotently, and fell
together. The carbine's loud shot rang in the room, but did no harm; and
|
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 Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: be Prince of Varese!"
My head was swimming. For me his confidences reached the proportions
of tragedy; at the sight of that white head of his and beyond it the
black water in the trenches of the Bastille lying still as a canal in
Venice, I had no words to answer him. Facino Cane thought, no doubt,
that I judged him, as the rest had done, with a disdainful pity; his
gesture expressed the whole philosophy of despair.
Perhaps his story had taken him back to happy days and to Venice. He
caught up his clarionet and made plaintive music, playing a Venetian
boat-song with something of his lost skill, the skill of the young
patrician lover. It was a sort of /Super flumina Babylonis/. Tears
|
