The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Beasts of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: black box ticked, ticked, ticked, with apparently unending
monotony; but yet, second by second, a little arm which
protruded from the periphery of one of its wheels came nearer
and nearer to another little arm which projected from the
hand which Paulvitch had set at a certain point upon the dial
beside the clockwork. When those two arms touched one
another the ticking of the mechanism would cease--for ever.
Jane and Tarzan stood upon the bridge looking out toward
Jungle Island. The men were forward, also watching the land
grow upward out of the ocean. The beasts had sought the
shade of the galley, where they were curled up in sleep.
 The Beasts of Tarzan |
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 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: people draw from the Old Testament the language, passions and illusions
for their own bourgeois revolution. When the real goal was reached,
when the remodeling of English society was accomplished, Locke
supplanted Habakuk.
Accordingly, the reviving of the dead in those revolutions served the
purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; it
served the purpose of exaggerating to the imagination the given task,
not to recoil before its practical solution; it served the purpose of
rekindling the revolutionary spirit, not to trot out its ghost.
In 1848-51 only the ghost of the old revolution wandered about, from
Marrast the "Relpublicain en gaunts jaunes," [#1 Silk-stocking
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