| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson: III
My Kingdom
Down by a shining water well
I found a very little dell,
No higher than my head.
The heather and the gorse about
In summer bloom were coming out,
Some yellow and some red.
I called the little pool a sea;
The little hills were big to me;
For I am very small.
A Child's Garden of Verses |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: hatred for her, for him, but not so much for him. Toward him I
felt a strange sentiment of my humiliation and his victory, but
toward her a terrible hatred.
"'But I cannot kill myself and leave her free. She must suffer,
she must understand at least that I have suffered,' said I to
myself.
"At a station I saw people drinking at the lunch counter, and
directly I went to swallow a glass of vodki. Beside me stood a
Jew, drinking also. He began to talk to me, and I, in order not
to be left alone in my compartment, went with him into his
third-class, dirty, full of smoke, and covered with peelings and
The Kreutzer Sonata |
