| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: speedily, then society relapses into a long fit of nervous reaction
before it learns how to appropriate the fruits of its period of feverish
excitement. Proletarian revolutions, on the contrary, such as those of
the nineteenth century, criticize themselves constantly; constantly
interrupt themselves in their own course; come back to what seems to
have been accomplished, in order to start over anew; scorn with cruel
thoroughness the half measures, weaknesses and meannesses of their first
attempts; seem to throw down their adversary only in order to enable him
to draw fresh strength from the earth, and again, to rise up against
them in more gigantic stature; constantly recoil in fear before the
undefined monster magnitude of their own objects--until finally that
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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 Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart: She fastened something to the gate-post, - I could see the nervous
haste with which she worked. When she joined me again it was
without explanation. But the clenched fingers were free now, and
while she looked tired and worn, the strain had visibly relaxed.
We walked along slowly in the general direction of the suburban
trolley line. Once a man with an empty wagon offered us a lift,
but after a glance at the springless vehicle I declined.
"The ends of the bone think they are castanets as it is," I
explained. "But the lady - "
The young lady, however, declined and we went on together. Once,
when the trolley line was in sight, she got a pebble in her low
The Man in Lower Ten |
