| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: people receiving the parcel with moist eyes and a prayer
for Jock or Jean in the city? For at this season, on the
threshold of another year of calamity and stubborn
conflict, men feel a need to draw closer the links that
unite them; they reckon the number of their friends, like
allies before a war; and the prayers grow longer in the
morning as the absent are recommended by name into God's
keeping.
On the day itself, the shops are all shut as on a
Sunday; only taverns, toyshops, and other holiday
magazines, keep open doors. Every one looks for his
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Main Street by Sinclair Lewis: shanty town. . . . "To think," she marveled, "of coming
two thousand miles, past mountains and cities, to get off here,
and to plan to stay here! What conceivable reason for
choosing this particular place?"
She noted a figure in a rusty coat and a cloth cap.
Kennicott chuckled, "Look who's coming! It's Sam Clark!
Gosh, all rigged out for the weather."
The two men shook hands a dozen times and, in the
Western fashion, bumbled, "Well, well, well, well, you old
hell-hound, you old devil, how are you, anyway? You old
horse-thief, maybe it ain't good to see you again!" While Sam
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: aims were never simply to get on; it had an altogether different
system of demands and satisfactions. It was critical, curious, more
than a little unfeeling--and relentlessly illuminating.
It is just the existence and development of this more generalised
self-behind-the-frontage that is making modern life so much more
subtle and intricate to render, and so much more hopeful in its
relations to the perplexities of the universe. I see this mental
and spiritual hinterland vary enormously in the people about me,
from a type which seems to keep, as people say, all its goods in the
window, to others who, like myself, come to regard the ostensible
existence more and more as a mere experimental feeder and agent for
|
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 Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte: her loss."
'"He's there, is he?" exclaimed my companion, rushing to the gap.
"If I can get my arm out I can hit him!"
'I'm afraid, Ellen, you'll set me down as really wicked; but you
don't know all, so don't judge. I wouldn't have aided or abetted
an attempt on even HIS life for anything. Wish that he were dead,
I must; and therefore I was fearfully disappointed, and unnerved by
terror for the consequences of my taunting speech, when he flung
himself on Earnshaw's weapon and wrenched it from his grasp.
'The charge exploded, and the knife, in springing back, closed into
its owner's wrist. Heathcliff pulled it away by main force,
Wuthering Heights |
