| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Chance by Joseph Conrad: mysterious sense of guilt--as though she had betrayed him into the
hands of an enemy. With his eyes shut he had an air of weary and
pious meditation. She was a little afraid of it. Next moment a
great pity for him filled her heart. And in the background there
was remorse. His face twitched now and then just perceptibly. He
managed to keep his eyelids down till he heard that the 'husband'
was a sailor and that he, the father, was being taken straight on
board ship ready to sail away from this abominable world of
treacheries, and scorns and envies and lies, away, away over the
blue sea, the sure, the inaccessible, the uncontaminated and
spacious refuge for wounded souls.
Chance |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: their camp, gave Mago some ground to suspect, as indeed he had long
sought for a pretence to be gone, that there was treachery contrived
against him; so that, although Hicetes entreated him to tarry, and
made it appear how much stronger they were than the enemy, yet,
conceiving they came far more short of Timoleon in respect of courage
and fortune, than they surpassed him in number, he presently went
aboard, and set sail for Africa, letting Sicily escape out of his
hands with dishonor to himself, and for such uncertain causes, that
no human reason could give an account of his departure.
The day after he went away, Timoleon came up before the city, in
array for a battle. But when he and his company heard of this sudden
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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 Walden by Henry David Thoreau: flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if
they formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the
clouds. They told me that in a good day they could get out a
thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre. Deep ruts and
"cradle-holes" were worn in the ice, as on terra firma, by the
passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horses invariably
ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out like buckets. They
stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile thirty-five feet
high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay between
the outside layers to exclude the air; for when the wind, though
never so cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large cavities,
Walden |
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 A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain: dragons from the egg, in his laboratory, he had watched
over them like a mother, and patiently studied them
and experimented upon them while they grew. Thus he had
found out that fire was the life principle of a dragon;
put out the dragon's fires and it could make steam
no longer, and must die. He could not put out a fire
with a spear, therefore he invented the extinguisher.
The dragon being dead, the emperor fell on the hero's neck
and said:
"Deliverer, name your request," at the same time beckoning
out behind with his heel for a detachment of his daughters
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