| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton: secret.
"Don't Miss Evelina have no headaches?" Mr. Ramy suddenly
asked.
"My, no, never--well, not to speak of, anyway. She ain't had
one for ages, and when Evelina IS sick she won't never give
in to it," Ann Eliza declared, making some hurried adjustments with
her conscience.
"I wouldn't have thought that," said Mr. Ramy.
"I guess you don't know us as well as you thought you did."
"Well, no, that's so; maybe I don't. I'll wish you good day,
Miss Bunner"; and Mr. Ramy moved toward the door.
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac: them, and rooms which they were at liberty to make, if not
exactly elegant or comfortable, at any rate clean and healthy? If
she had committed some flagrant act of injustice, the victim
would have borne it in silence.
Such a gathering contained, as might have been expected, the
elements out of which a complete society might be constructed.
And, as in a school, as in the world itself, there was among the
eighteen men and women who met round the dinner table a poor
creature, despised by all the others, condemned to be the butt of
all their jokes. At the beginning of Eugene de Rastignac's second
twelvemonth, this figure suddenly started out into bold relief
Father Goriot |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Tono Bungay by H. G. Wells: Kensington High Street, and burst into a perfect clamour; six or
seven times I saw it as I drew near my diggings. It certainly
had an air of being something more than a dream.
Yes, I thought it over--thoroughly enough.... Trade rules the
world. Wealth rather than trade! The thing was true, and true
too was my uncle's proposition that the quickest way to get
wealth is to sell the cheapest thing possible in the dearest
bottle. He was frightfully right after all. Pecunnia non
olet,--a Roman emperor said that. Perhaps my great heroes in
Plutarch were no more than such men, fine now only because they
are distant; perhaps after all this Socialism to which I had been
|
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 Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad: I heard the other raise his voice incredulously--"What? The
Captain himself?" Then a few more murmurs, a door closed, then another.
A few moments later I went on deck.
My strangeness, which had made me sleepless, had prompted that
unconventional arrangement, as if I had expected in those solitary
hours of the night to get on terms with the ship of which I
knew nothing, manned by men of whom I knew very little more.
Fast alongside a wharf, littered like any ship in port with a
tangle of unrelated things, invaded by unrelated shore people,
I had hardly seen her yet properly. Now, as she lay cleared for sea,
the stretch of her main-deck seemed to me very find under the stars.
The Secret Sharer |
