| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: And they lay like pillars prone; and his hand encountered the boy,
And there sprang in the gloom of his soul a sudden lightning of joy.
"Him can I save!" he thought, "if I were speedy enough."
And he loosened the cloth from his loins, and swaddled the child in the stuff;
And about the strength of his neck he knotted the burden well.
There where the roof had fallen, it roared like the mouth of hell.
Thither Rahero went, stumbling on senseless folk,
And grappled a post of the house, and began to climb in the smoke:
The last alive of Vaiau; and the son borne by the sire.
The post glowed in the grain with ulcers of eating fire,
And the fire bit to the blood and mangled his hands and thighs;
Ballads |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tom and I shook hands, the rest of us exchanged a cool nod, and
they trotted quickly down the drive, disappearing under the August
foliage just as Gatsby, with hat and light overcoat in hand, came out
the front door.
Tom was evidently perturbed at Daisy's running around alone, for on the
following Saturday night he came with her to Gatsby's party. Perhaps
his presence gave the evening its peculiar quality of oppressiveness--it
stands out in my memory from Gatsby's other parties that summer. There
were the same people, or at least the same sort of people, the same
profusion of champagne, the same many-colored, many-keyed commotion,
but I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that
The Great Gatsby |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs: in our scheme of escape.
"Very well," I said, "you may come with us, Hooja; but at
the first intimation of treachery I shall run my sword
through you. Do you understand?"
He said that he did.
Some time later we had removed the skins from the four Mahars,
and so succeeded in crawling inside of them ourselves
that there seemed an excellent chance for us to pass
unnoticed from Phutra. It was not an easy thing to fasten
the hides together where we had split them along the belly
to remove them from their carcasses, but by remaining
At the Earth's Core |
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 War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: he quite understood them and shared their opinion, but for that very
reason he could not understand how the man who put them there behind
the hill could have made so gross and palpable a blunder.
Pierre did not know that these troops were not, as Bennigsen
supposed, put there to defend the position, but were in a concealed
position as an ambush, that they should not be seen and might be
able to strike an approaching enemy unexpectedly. Bennigsen did not
know this and moved the troops forward according to his own ideas
without mentioning the matter to the commander in chief.
CHAPTER XXIV
On that bright evening of August 25, Prince Andrew lay leaning on
War and Peace |
