| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: Than those who live in this dull cold.
And there to music low and sweet
Sevillian maids, from eve till dawn,
Dance lightly on the moonlit lawn
In satin shoes, on dainty feet.
Ah, you would be the first to blush
Over your dancers' romp and rush,
And your too hideous carnival,
That turns your cheeks all chill and blue,
And skips the mud in hob-nail'd shoe--
A truly dismal festival.
The Muse of the Department |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot: of daily life, enable us to discriminate at once by
the sense of touch, between the angles of an equal-sided Triangle,
Square, and Pentagon; and I need not say that the brainless vertex
of an acute-angled Isosceles is obvious to the dullest touch.
It is therefore not necessary, as a rule, to do more than feel
a single angle of an individual; and this, once ascertained,
tells us the class of the person whom we are addressing,
unless indeed he belongs to the higher sections of the nobility.
There the difficulty is much greater. Even a Master of Arts
in our University of Wentbridge has been known to confuse a ten-sided
with a twelve-sided Polygon; and there is hardly a Doctor of Science
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber: a small black pipe, from another a bag of tobacco, from another a
match. The long, deft fingers made a brief task of it.
"I didn't ask you," he said, after the first puff, "because I
could see that you weren't the fool kind that objects." Then, with
amazing suddenness, "Know any of the editors?"
"Know them!" cried Mary Louise. "Know them! If camping on
their doorsteps, and haunting the office buildings, and cajoling,
and fighting with secretaries and office boys, and assistants and
things constitutes knowing them, then we're chums."
"What makes you think you can write?" sneered the thin man.
Mary Louise gathered up her brush, and comb, and towel, and
Buttered Side Down |
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 One Basket by Edna Ferber: "I'll stay if you want me to."
"Oh, please! I'll make up your bed and you can rest----"
"I'm not sleepy. I'm not much of a hand to sleep anyway. I'll
sit up here in the hall, where there's a light. You get to bed.
I'll watch and see that everything's all right. Have you got
something I can read out here--something kind of lively--with a
love story in it?"
So the night went by. Snooky slept in her white bed. The Very
Young Wife half dozed in her bed, so near the little one. In the
hall, her stout figure looming grotesque in wall shadows, sat
Blanche Devine, pretending to read. Now and then she rose and
One Basket |
