| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from 1984 by George Orwell: years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
It was always at night--the arrests invariably happened at night. The
sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights
glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast
majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People
simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the
registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your
one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished,
annihilated: VAPORIZED was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a
hurried untidy scrawl:
1984 |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Rivers to the Sea by Sara Teasdale: And I have pierced the pain and come to peace
I hold my peace, my Cleïs, on my heart;
And softer than a little wild bird's wing
Are kisses that she pours upon my mouth.
Ah never any more when spring like fire
Will flicker in the newly opened leaves,
Shall I steal forth to seek for solitude
Beyond the lure of light Alcaeus' lyre,
Beyond the sob that stilled Erinna's voice.
Ah, never with a throat that aches with song,
Beneath the white uncaring sky of spring,
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner: hundred yards from here! They found the bloody rascal by a little path he
tramped down to the water, trodden hard, just like a porcupine's walk.
They got him in the hole like an aardvark, with a bush over the mouth, so
you couldn't see it. He'd evidently been there a long time, the floor was
full of bones of fish he'd caught in the pool, and there was a bit of root
like a stick half gnawed through. He'd been potted, and got two bullet
wounds in the thigh; but he could walk already. It's evident he was just
waiting till we were gone, to clear off after his people. He'd got that
beastly scurvy look a nigger gets when he hasn't had anything to eat for a
long time.
"Well, they hauled him up before the Captain, of course; and he blew and
|
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 Bab:A Sub-Deb, Mary Roberts Rinehart by Mary Roberts Rinehart: Nobody spoke then, and my heart beat fast and hard. I leave it to
anybody, how they'd like to be shut in a closet and threatened with
a violent Death from without. Would or would they not ever be the
same person afterwards?
"I'll tell you what I'd do," said the Beecher woman. "I'd climb up
the back of father, next door, and tell him what his little
Daughter has done, Because I know she's mixed up in it, towle or no
towle. Reg is always sappy when they're seventeen. And she's been
looking moon-eyed at him for days."
Well, the Pattens went away, and Mrs. Beecher manacured her Nails,--
I could hear her fileing them--and sang around and was not much
|
