| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: outside the harbour, and running across the open bay; and lucky
for you that there are no rollers coming in from the Atlantic, and
spouting up those cliffs in columns of white foam.
* * *
"Hoch!"
Ah! Who was that coughed just behind the ship?
Who, indeed? look round and see.
There is nobody. There could not be in the sea.
Look--there, a quarter of a mile away.
Oh! What is that turning over in the water, like a great black
wheel? And a great tooth on it, and--oh! it is gone!
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: corking standard!
"No, what I fight in Zenith is standardization of thought, and, of course, the
traditions of competition. The real villains of the piece are the clean,
kind, industrious Family Men who use every known brand of trickery and cruelty
to insure the prosperity of their cubs. The worst thing about these fellows is
that they're so good and, in their work at least, so intelligent. You can't
hate them properly, and yet their standardized minds are the enemy.
"Then this boosting--Sneakingly I have a notion that Zenith is a better place
to live in than Manchester or Glasgow or Lyons or Berlin or Turin--"
"It is not, and I have lift in most of them," murmured Dr. Yavitch.
"Well, matter of taste. Personally, I prefer a city with a future so unknown
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Son of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: I have lived in the trees with Korak and A'ht."
"Where in the jungle lives Korak?" asked the stranger.
Meriem pointed with a sweep of her hand that took in, generously,
half the continent of Africa.
"Could you find your way back to him?"
"I do not know," she replied; "but he will find his way to me."
"Then I have a plan," said the stranger. "I live but a few
marches from here. I shall take you home where my wife will
look after you and care for you until we can find Korak or Korak
finds us. If he could find you here he can find you at my village.
Is it not so?"
The Son of Tarzan |
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 Ruling Passion by Henry van Dyke: of mockery and wrath, remembered chiefly for the evil things that
they have said with cleverness.
"For be sure of this, Scholar, the more a man giveth himself to
hatred in this world, the more will he find to hate. But let us
rather give ourselves to charity, and if we have enemies (and what
honest man hath them not?) let them be ours, since they must, but
let us not be theirs, since we know better.
"There was one Franck, a trooper of Cromwell's, who wrote ill of me,
saying that I neither understood the subjects whereof I discoursed
nor believed the things that I said, being both silly and
pretentious. It would have been a pity if it had been true. There
|
