| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lysis by Plato: make to them--must we not admit that they speak the truth?
We must.
They will then proceed to ask whether the enemy is the friend of the
friend, or the friend the friend of the enemy?
Neither, he replied.
Well, but is a just man the friend of the unjust, or the temperate of the
intemperate, or the good of the bad?
I do not see how that is possible.
And yet, I said, if friendship goes by contraries, the contraries must be
friends.
They must.
Lysis |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac: beauty, he likewise remained in the memory of all mothers as the best
match in France.
The beauty, the great wealth, the intellectual qualities, of these two
children came entirely from their mother. The Comte de Lanty was a
short, thin, ugly little man, as dismal as a Spaniard, as great a bore
as a banker. He was looked upon, however, as a profound politician,
perhaps because he rarely laughed, and was always quoting M. de
Metternich or Wellington.
This mysterious family had all the attractiveness of a poem by Lord
Byron, whose difficult passages were translated differently by each
person in fashionable society; a poem that grew more obscure and more
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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 Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar by Edgar Rice Burroughs: of his treachery and greed back toward his former home
it is difficult to guess, unless it was that without
Tarzan there could be no ransom for Tarzan's wife.
That night they camped in the valley beyond the hills,
and as they sat before a little fire where cooked a
wild pig that had fallen to one of Tarzan's arrows, the
latter sat lost in speculation. He seemed continually
to be trying to grasp some mental image which as
constantly eluded him.
At last he opened the leathern pouch which hung at his
side. From it he poured into the palm of his hand a
Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar |
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 Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: the young man's life was spent in the most exhausting
professional labours--and he had never thought it
necessary to undeceive them.
The next two or three days dragged by heavily. The
taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and
there were moments when he felt as if he were being
buried alive under his future. He heard nothing of the
Countess Olenska, or of the perfect little house, and
though he met Beaufort at the club they merely nodded
at each other across the whist-tables. It was not till the
fourth evening that he found a note awaiting him on
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