| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: hundred crowns to my future prospects."
Desplein at these words clutched Bianchon's arm tightly. "He gave
me the money for my examination fees! That man, my friend,
understood that I had a mission, that the needs of my intellect
were greater than his. He looked after me, he called me his boy,
he lent me money to buy books, he would come in softly sometimes
to watch me at work, and took a mother's care in seeing that I
had wholesome and abundant food, instead of the bad and
insufficient nourishment I had been condemned to. Bourgeat, a man
of about forty, had a homely, mediaeval type of face, a prominent
forehead, a head that a painter might have chosen as a model for
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from To-morrow by Joseph Conrad: in a warehouse. There would be tables wrapped
up in sacking; rolls of carpets thick and vertical
like fragments of columns, the gleam of white mar-
ble tops in the dimness of the drawn blinds. Cap-
tain Hagberd always described his purchases to
her, carefully, as to a person having a legitimate
interest in them. The overgrown yard of his cot-
tage could be laid over with concrete . . . after
to-morrow.
"We may just as well do away with the fence.
You could have your drying-line out, quite clear of
To-morrow |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: crucified Christ hung livid against indigo clouds. The central
figure of the foreground, however, was that of a woman seated in
an antique chair of marble with bas-reliefs of dancing maenads.
Her feet rested on a meadow sprinkled with minute wild-flowers,
and her attitude of smiling majesty recalled that of Dosso
Dossi's Circe. She wore a red robe, flowing in closely fluted
lines from under a fancifully embroidered cloak. Above her high
forehead the crinkled golden hair flowed sideways beneath a veil;
one hand drooped on the arm of her chair; the other held up an
inverted human skull, into which a young Dionysus, smooth, brown
and sidelong as the St. John of the Louvre, poured a stream of
|
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 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence: these last hundred years: men turned into nothing but labour-insects,
and all their manhood taken away, and all their real life. I'd wipe the
machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch
absolutely, like a black mistake. But since I can't, an' nobody can,
I'd better hold my peace, an' try an' live my own life: if I've got one
to live, which I rather doubt.'
The thunder had ceased outside, but the rain which had abated, suddenly
came striking down, with a last blench of lightning and mutter of
departing storm. Connie was uneasy. He had talked so long now, and he
was really talking to himself not to her. Despair seemed to come down
on him completely, and she was feeling happy, she hated despair. She
Lady Chatterley's Lover |
