| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Forged Coupon by Leo Tolstoy: him inconsistent, if not insincere. This is the
prevailing attitude of politicians and literary men.
Must one conclude that the mass of mankind
has lost touch with idealism? On the contrary,
in spite of modern materialism, or even because of
it, many leaders of spiritual thought have arisen
in our times, and have won the ear of vast audi-
ences. Their message is a call to a simpler life,
to a recognition of the responsibilities of wealth,
to the avoidance of war by arbitration, and sink-
ing of class hatred in a deep sense of universal
The Forged Coupon |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac: Guillaume's daughters, the pretty maiden who has just now appeared to
the bewitched man in the street.
Though each of these apprentices, even the eldest, paid a round sum
for his board, not one of them would have been bold enough to remain
at the master's table when dessert was served. When Madame Guillaume
talked of dressing the salad, the hapless youths trembled as they
thought of the thrift with which her prudent hand dispensed the oil.
They could never think of spending a night away from the house without
having given, long before, a plausible reason for such an
irregularity. Every Sunday, each in his turn, two of them accompanied
the Guillaume family to Mass at Saint-Leu, and to vespers.
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Persuasion by Jane Austen: Anne, satisfied at a very early period of Lady Russell's meaning
to love Captain Wentworth as she ought, had no other alloy
to the happiness of her prospects than what arose from the consciousness
of having no relations to bestow on him which a man of sense could value.
There she felt her own inferiority very keenly. The disproportion
in their fortune was nothing; it did not give her a moment's regret;
but to have no family to receive and estimate him properly,
nothing of respectability, of harmony, of good will to offer
in return for all the worth and all the prompt welcome which met her
in his brothers and sisters, was a source of as lively pain
as her mind could well be sensible of under circumstances of otherwise
Persuasion |
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 Herbert West: Reanimator by H. P. Lovecraft: a similar thing one horrible night in Arkham. We approached the
house from the field in the rear, took the specimen in the back
door and down the cellar stairs, and prepared it for the usual
experiment. Our fear of the police was absurdly great, though
we had timed our trip to avoid the solitary patrolman of that
section.
The result was wearily anticlimactic. Ghastly as our
prize appeared, it was wholly unresponsive to every solution we
injected in its black arm; solutions prepared from experience
with white specimens only. So as the hour grew dangerously near
to dawn, we did as we had done with the others -- dragged the
Herbert West: Reanimator |
