| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Euthydemus by Plato: insist on asking--that I pretty well know--out of envy, in order to prevent
me from learning the wisdom of Euthydemus.
Then answer me, he said.
Well then, I said, I can only reply that Iolaus was not my nephew at all,
but the nephew of Heracles; and his father was not my brother Patrocles,
but Iphicles, who has a name rather like his, and was the brother of
Heracles.
And is Patrocles, he said, your brother?
Yes, I said, he is my half-brother, the son of my mother, but not of my
father.
Then he is and is not your brother.
|
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 Heart of the West by O. Henry: to him that he had more money than was decent. But when he had bought
a watch with precious stones set in the case so large that they hurt
his ribs, and a California saddle with silver nails and Angora skin
/suaderos/, and ordered everybody up to the bar for whisky--what else
was there for him to spend money for?
Not so circumscribed in expedient for the reduction of surplus wealth
were those lairds of the lariat who had womenfolk to their name. In
the breast of the rib-sprung sex the genius of purse lightening may
slumber through years of inopportunity, but never, my brothers, does
it become extinct.
So, out of the chaparral came Long Bill Longley from the Bar Circle
Heart of the West |
