| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Proposed Roads To Freedom by Bertrand Russell: play, in which love is purged of the instinct for
domination, in which cruelty and envy have been
dispelled by happiness and the unfettered development
of all the instincts that build up life and fill it with
mental delights. Such a world is possible; it waits
only for men to wish to create it.
Meantime, the world in which we exist has other
aims. But it will pass away, burned up in the fire
of its own hot passions; and from its ashes will spring
a new and younger world, full of fresh hope, with
the light of morning in its eyes.
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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 Reef by Edith Wharton: probed, insisted, cross-examined, not rested till she had
dragged the secret to the light. She was one of the luckless
women who always have the wrong audacities, and who always
know it...
Was it she, Anna Leath, who was picturing herself to herself
in that way? She recoiled from her thoughts as if with a
sense of demoniac possession, and there flashed through her
the longing to return to her old state of fearless
ignorance. If at that moment she could have kept Darrow
from following her to Givre she would have done so...
But he came; and with the sight of him the turmoil fell and
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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 The Golden Sayings of Epictetus by Epictetus: ground, it may chance dislocate an arm, sprain an ankle, gulp
down abundance of yellow sand, be scourge with the whip--and with
all this sometimes lose the victory. Count the cost--and then, if
your desire still holds, try the wrestler's life. Else let me
tell you that you will be behaving like a pack of children
playing now at wrestlers, now at gladiators; presently falling to
trumpeting and anon to stageplaying, when the fancy takes them
for what they have seen. And you are even the same: wrestler,
gladiator, philosopher, orator all by turns and none of them with
your whole soul. Like an ape, you mimic what you see, to one
thing constant never; the thing that is familiar charms no more.
The Golden Sayings of Epictetus |
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 First Men In The Moon by H. G. Wells: observers have been engaged in perfecting apparatus for receiving and
recording these vibrations, though few would go so far to consider them
actual messages from some extraterrestrial sender. Among that few,
however, we must certainly count Mr. Wendigee. Ever since 1898 he had
devoted himself almost entirely to this subject, and being a man of ample
means he had erected an observatory on the flanks of Monte Rosa, in a
position singularly adapted in every way for such observations.
My scientific attainments, I must admit, are not great, but so far as they
enable me to judge, Mr. Wendigee's contrivances for detecting and
recording any disturbances in the electromagnetic conditions of space are
singularly original and ingenious. And by a happy combination of
The First Men In The Moon |
