| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: financier is trampling on the living, the attorney on the dead, the
pleader on the conscience. Forced to be speaking without a rest, they
all substitute words for ideas, phrases for feelings, and their soul
becomes a larynx. Neither the great merchant, nor the judge, nor the
pleader preserves his sense of right; they feel no more, they apply
set rules that leave cases out of count. Borne along by their headlong
course, they are neither husbands nor fathers nor lovers; they glide
on sledges over the facts of life, and live at all times at the high
pressure conduced by business and the vast city. When they return to
their homes they are required to go to a ball, to the opera, into
society, where they can make clients, acquaintances, protectors. They
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: for one among the thousand undenoted countenances of the city
street, and to divine in others the throb of human agony and hope.
In the meantime he will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces,
the cripple, the sweet whiff of chloroform - for there, on the most
thoughtless, the pains of others are burned home; but he will
continue to walk, in a divine self-pity, the aisles of the
forgotten graveyard. The length of man's life, which is endless to
the brave and busy, is scorned by his ambitious thought. He cannot
bear to have come for so little, and to go again so wholly. He
cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be still idle, and
by way of cure, neglects the little that he has to do. The parable
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Poems by T. S. Eliot: So the hand of the child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along
the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child's eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.
Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
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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 Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter: and catch you every man a wife from the daughters of
Shiloh"--a touching example apparently of early so-called
'marriage by capture'! Or there were dances, also partly
or originally religious, of a quite orgiastic and Bacchanalian
character, like the Bryallicha performed in Sparta by
men and women in hideous masks, or the Deimalea by
Sileni and Satyrs waltzing in a circle; or the Bibasis
carried out by both men and women--a quite gymnastic
exercise in which the performers took a special pride in striking
their own buttocks with their heels! or others wilder
still, which it would perhaps not be convenient to
Pagan and Christian Creeds |
