| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin: and of sensible conversation.
Thomas Godfrey, a self-taught mathematician, great in his way,
and afterward inventor of what is now called Hadley's Quadrant.
But he knew little out of his way, and was not a pleasing companion;
as, like most great mathematicians I have met with, he expected
universal precision in everything said, or was for ever denying or
distinguishing upon trifles, to the disturbance of all conversation.
He soon left us.
Nicholas Scull, a surveyor, afterwards surveyor-general,
who lov'd books, and sometimes made a few verses.
William Parsons, bred a shoemaker, but loving reading, had acquir'd
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from 1984 by George Orwell: a coverless bolster. The old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was
ticking away on the mantelpiece. In the corner, on the gateleg table, the
glass paperweight which he had bought on his last visit gleamed softly out
of the half-darkness.
In the fender was a battered tin oilstove, a saucepan, and two cups,
provided by Mr Charrington. Winston lit the burner and set a pan of water
to boil. He had brought an envelope full of Victory Coffee and some
saccharine tablets. The clock's hands said seventeen-twenty: it was
nineteen-twenty really. She was coming at nineteen-thirty.
Folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious, gratuitous, suicidal folly.
Of all the crimes that a Party member could commit, this one was the least
1984 |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: There is a further difficulty in explaining this part of the Timaeus--the
natural order of thought is inverted. We begin with the most abstract, and
proceed from the abstract to the concrete. We are searching into things
which are upon the utmost limit of human intelligence, and then of a sudden
we fall rather heavily to the earth. There are no intermediate steps which
lead from one to the other. But the abstract is a vacant form to us until
brought into relation with man and nature. God and the world are mere
names, like the Being of the Eleatics, unless some human qualities are
added on to them. Yet the negation has a kind of unknown meaning to us.
The priority of God and of the world, which he is imagined to have created,
to all other existences, gives a solemn awe to them. And as in other
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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 Tales and Fantasies by Robert Louis Stevenson: should find him waiting. As he got there the day began to
dawn, and he leaned over a hurdle and beheld the shadows flee
away. Up went the sun at last out of a bank of clouds that
were already disbanding in the east; a herald wind had
already sprung up to sweep the leafy earth and scatter the
congregated dewdrops. 'Alas!' thought Dick Naseby, 'how can
any other day come so distastefully to me?' He still wanted
his experience of the morrow.
CHAPTER VII - THE ELOPEMENT
IT was probably on the stroke of ten, and Dick had been half
asleep for some time against the bank, when Esther came up
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