| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: If a modern sculptor were to come and say, 'Very well, but where
can one find subjects for sculpture out of men who wear frock-coats
and chimney-pot hats?' I would tell him to go to the docks of a
great city and watch the men loading or unloading the stately
ships, working at wheel or windlass, hauling at rope or gangway. I
have never watched a man do anything useful who has not been
graceful at some moment of his labour: it is only the loafer and
the idle saunterer who is as useless and uninteresting to the
artist as he is to himself. I would ask the sculptor to go with me
to any of your schools or universities, to the running ground and
gymnasium, to watch the young men start for a race, hurling quoit
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln: 130 years after it was spoken. We will rerelease the
Inaugural Address of President Kennedy, officially on
November 22, 1993, on the day of the 30th anniversary
of his assassination.
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, given November 19, 1863
on the battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, USA
#STARTMARK#
Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth
upon this continent a new nation: conceived in liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war. . .testing whether
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Options by O. Henry: than any one else in the world."
"Be advised," said North. "My chef has pinched the blue ribbon from
the lot. He lays some slices of bacon inside the trout, wraps it all
in corn-husks--the husks of green corn, you know--buries them in hot
ashes and covers them with live coals. We build fires on the bank of
the lake and have fish suppers."
"I know," said I. "And the servants bring down tables and chairs and
damask cloths, and you eat with silver forks. I know the kind of
camps that you millionaires have. And therc are champagne pails set
about, disgracing the wild flowers, and, no doubt, Madame Tetrazzini
to sing in the boat pavilion after the trout."
Options |
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 Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: have heard said) the decay of the Ancien Regime produced the new
Regime--a loose metaphor, which, like all metaphors, will not hold
water, and must not be taken for a philosophic truth. That would be
to confess man--what I shall never confess him to be--the creature
of circumstances; it would be to fall into the same fallacy of
spontaneous generation as did the ancients, when they believed that
bees were bred from the carcass of a dead ox. In the first place,
the bees were no bees, but flies--unless when some true swarm of
honey bees may have taken up their abode within the empty ribs, as
Samson's bees did in that of the lion. But bees or flies, each
sprang from an egg, independent of the carcass, having a vitality of
|
