| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde: stripped from one's face, and all the while to hear the laughter,
the horrible laughter of the world, a thing more tragic than all
the tears the world has ever shed. You don't know what it is. One
pays for one's sin, and then one pays again, and all one's life one
pays. You must never know that. - As for me, if suffering be an
expiation, then at this moment I have expiated all my faults,
whatever they have been; for to-night you have made a heart in one
who had it not, made it and broken it. - But let that pass. I may
have wrecked my own life, but I will not let you wreck yours. You
- why, you are a mere girl, you would be lost. You haven't got the
kind of brains that enables a woman to get back. You have neither
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Dreams by Olive Schreiner: maimedness were great evils. Here men make them to a rejoicing."
God said, "Didst thou then think that love had need of eyes and hands!"
And I walked down the shining way with palms on either hand. I said to
God, "Ever since I was a little child and sat alone and cried, I have
dreamed of this land, and now I will not go away again. I will stay here
and shine." And I began to take off my garments, that I might shine as
others in that land; but when I looked down I saw my body gave no light. I
said to God, "How is it?"
God said, "Is there no dark blood in your heart; is it bitter against
none?"
And I said, "Yes--"; and I thought--"Now is the time when I will tell God,
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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 Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: of the social and material condition of the people at the North.
I had no proper idea of the wealth, refinement, enterprise,
and high civilization of this section of the country.
My "Columbian Orator," almost my only book, had done nothing
to enlighten me concerning Northern society. I had been taught
that slavery was the bottom fact of all wealth. With this foundation idea,
I came naturally to the conclusion that poverty must be the general
condition of the people of the free States. In the country from which I came,
a white man holding no slaves was usually an ignorant and poverty-stricken man,
and men of this class were contemptuously called "poor white trash."
Hence I supposed that, since the non-slave-holders at the South were ignorant,
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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: a process which he found essential to the composition of his own.
For a considerable time nothing was to be heard but the ticking
of the clock and the fitful scratch of Rachel's pen, as she produced
phrases which bore a considerable likeness to those which she
had condemned. She was struck by it herself, for she stopped writing
and looked up; looked at Terence deep in the arm-chair, looked
at the different pieces of furniture, at her bed in the corner,
at the window-pane which showed the branches of a tree filled
in with sky, heard the clock ticking, and was amazed at the gulf
which lay between all that and her sheet of paper. Would there
ever be a time when the world was one and indivisible? Even with
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