| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Idylls of the King by Alfred Tennyson: I, maiden, round thee, maiden, bind my belt.
Go forth, for thou shalt see what I have seen,
And break through all, till one will crown thee king
Far in the spiritual city:" and as she spake
She sent the deathless passion in her eyes
Through him, and made him hers, and laid her mind
On him, and he believed in her belief.
`Then came a year of miracle: O brother,
In our great hall there stood a vacant chair,
Fashioned by Merlin ere he past away,
And carven with strange figures; and in and out
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: food means, and she insists on being cook! If woman had been a
thinking creature, she should certainly, as cook for thousands of
years, have discovered the most important physiological facts,
and should likewise have got possession of the healing art!
Through bad female cooks--through the entire lack of reason in
the kitchen--the development of mankind has been longestretarded
and most interfered with: even today matters are very little
better. A word to High School girls.
235. There are turns and casts of fancy, there are sentences,
little handfuls of words, in which a whole culture, a whole
society suddenly crystallises itself. Among these is the
Beyond Good and Evil |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: just heard? I can explain it in a few words. There are two kinds of
music: one, petty, poor, second-rate, always the same, based on a
hundred or so of phrases which every musician has at his command, a
more or less agreeable form of babble which most composers live in. We
listen to their strains, their would-be melodies, with more or less
satisfaction, but absolutely nothing is left in our mind; by the end
of the century they are forgotten. But the nations, from the beginning
of time till our own day, have cherished as a precious treasure
certain strains which epitomize their instincts and habits; I might
almost say their history. Listen to one of these primitive tones,--the
Gregorian chant, for instance, is, in sacred song, the inheritance of
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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 The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: Helen replied, "and I always break it."
She leant back in her chair and looked laughingly at the young man.
She could see that he was genuinely cross, if at the same time
slightly excited.
"However," he said, resuming his jaunty tone, "I suppose one must
just make up one's mind to it."
"To what?"
"There never will be more than five people in the world worth
talking to."
Slowly the flush and sparkle in Helen's face died away, and she
looked as quiet and as observant as usual.
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