| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: shortly before the death of Socrates. At the time of his own death he is
supposed to be a full-grown man. Allowing nine or ten years for the
interval between youth and manhood, the dialogue could not have been
written earlier than 390, when Plato was about thirty-nine years of age.
No more definite date is indicated by the engagement in which Theaetetus is
said to have fallen or to have been wounded, and which may have taken place
any time during the Corinthian war, between the years 390-387. The later
date which has been suggested, 369, when the Athenians and Lacedaemonians
disputed the Isthmus with Epaminondas, would make the age of Theaetetus at
his death forty-five or forty-six. This a little impairs the beauty of
Socrates' remark, that 'he would be a great man if he lived.'
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: of that. I preferred Caesar, because his statement that Gaul is
divided into three parts, though neither interesting nor true, was the
only Latin sentence I could translate at sight: therefore the longer
we stuck at Caesar the better I was pleased. Just so do less
classically educated children see nothing in the mastery of addition
but the beginning of subtraction, and so on through multiplication and
division and fractions, with the black cloud of algebra on the
horizon. And if a boy rushes through all that, there is always the
calculus to fall back on, unless indeed you insist on his learning
music, and proceed to hit him if he cannot tell you the year Beethoven
was born.
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: ever since his visits of long ago,--these were less powerful than
the purifying influence scattered throughout the atmosphere of the
household by the presence of one youthful, fresh, and thoroughly
wholesome heart. There was no morbidness in Phoebe; if there
had been, the old Pyncheon House was the very locality to ripen
it into incurable disease. But now her spirit resembled, in its
potency, a minute quantity of ottar of rose in one of Hepzibah's
huge, iron-bound trunks, diffusing its fragrance through the
various articles of linen and wrought-lace, kerchiefs, caps,
stockings, folded dresses, gloves, and whatever else was treasured
there. As every article in the great trunk was the sweeter for the
House of Seven Gables |
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 Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: loves, - to talk, for instance, of the Ulmus Americana, and
describe the ciliated edges of its samara, and all that, - you are
an anserine individual, and I must refer you to a dull friend who
will discourse to you of such matters. What should you think of a
lover who should describe the idol of his heart in the language of
science, thus: Class, Mammalia; Order, Primates; Genus, Homo;
Species, Europeus; Variety, Brown; Individual, Ann Eliza; Dental
Formula
2-2 1-1 2-2 3-3
i---c---p---m---
2-2 1-1 2-2 3-3'
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
