| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Blue Flower by Henry van Dyke: like a gazelle.
But the first beam of the rising sun sent a long shadow before
her as she entered upon the final stadium of the journey, and the
eyes of Artaban, anxiously scanning the great mound of Nimrod and
the Temple of the Seven Spheres, could discern no trace of his
friends.
The many-coloured terraces of black and orange and red and
yellow and green and blue and white, shattered by the
convulsions of nature, and crumbling under the repeated blows
of human violence, still glittered like a ruined rainbow in
the morning light.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: was quite still and dead by that time."
"You have heard everything, Dr. Orszay?" asked the detective, rising
from his chair.
"Yes, I have heard everything," answered the venerable head of the
asylum. He was utterly crushed by the realisation that all this
tragedy and horror had gone out from his house.
Varna rose also. He understood perfectly that now Gyuri's power
was at an end and he was as pleased as a child that has just
received a present. "And now you're going to shoot him?" he asked,
in the tone a boy would use if asking when the fireworks were to
begin.
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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 Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: which reached its perfection in our own Spenser's "Fairy Queen"--
perhaps the most admirable poem which has ever been penned by
mortal man.
And why? What has made these old Greek myths live, myths though
they be, and fables, and fair dreams? What--though they have no
body, and, perhaps, never had--has given them an immortal soul,
which can speak to the immortal souls of all generations to come?
What but this, that in them--dim it may be and undeveloped, but
still there--lies the divine idea of self-sacrifice as the
perfection of heroism, of self-sacrifice, as the highest duty and
the highest joy of him who claims a kindred with the gods?
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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 To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: drawn; she flamboyant, careless. For things had worked loose after the
first year or so; the marriage had turned out rather badly.
And this, Lily thought, taking the green paint on her brush, this
making up scenes about them, is what we call "knowing" people,
"thinking" of them, "being fond" of them! Not a word of it was true;
she had made it up; but it was what she knew them by all the same. She
went on tunnelling her way into her picture, into the past.
Another time, Paul said he "played chess in coffee-houses." She had
built up a whole structure of imagination on that saying too. She
remembered how, as he said it, she thought how he rang up the servant,
and she said, "Mrs Rayley's out, sir," and he decided that he would not
To the Lighthouse |
