| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Soul of a Bishop by H. G. Wells: Newnham. Her doubts had not visibly affected Clementina or her
other sisters, and the bishop made no further attempts to explore
the spiritual life of his family below the surface of its formal
acquiescence.
As a matter of fact his own spiritual wrestlings were almost
exclusively nocturnal. During his spells of insomnia he led a
curiously double existence. In the daytime he was largely the
self he had always been, able, assured, ecclesiastical, except
that he was a little jaded and irritable or sleepy instead of
being quick and bright; he believed in God and the church and the
Royal Family and himself securely; in the wakeful night time he
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: burthen followed me as I went, with yearning and reproach. And at
length, one melancholy afternoon in the early autumn, and at a
place where it seems to me, looking back, it must be always autumn
and generally Sunday, there came suddenly upon the face of all I
saw - the long empty road, the lines of the tall houses, the church
upon the hill, the woody hillside garden - a look of such a
piercing sadness that my heart died; and seating myself on a door-
step, I shed tears of miserable sympathy. A benevolent cat
cumbered me the while with consolations - we two were alone in all
that was visible of the London Road: two poor waifs who had each
tasted sorrow - and she fawned upon the weeper, and gambolled for
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: hear, as I imagine I now hear them, for the sound seems still to ring in
my ears.
If I could but tell this part in such moving accents as should alarm
the very soul of the reader, I should rejoice that I recorded those
things, however short and imperfect.
It pleased God that I was still spared, and very hearty and sound in
health, but very impatient of being pent up within doors without air,
as I had been for fourteen days or thereabouts; and I could not restrain
myself, but I would go to carry a letter for my brother to the post-
house. Then it was indeed that I observed a profound silence in the
streets. When I came to the post-house, as I went to put in my letter I
A Journal of the Plague Year |
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 Agent by Joseph Conrad: could shake his faith, but because the mere fact of hearing another
voice disconcerted him painfully, confusing his thoughts at once -
these thoughts that for so many years, in a mental solitude more
barren than a waterless desert, no living voice had ever combatted,
commented, or approved.
No one interrupted him now, and he made again the confession of his
faith, mastering him irresistible and complete like an act of
grace: the secret of fate discovered in the material side of life;
the economic condition of the world responsible for the past and
shaping the future; the source of all history, of all ideas,
guiding the mental development of mankind and the very impulses of
The Secret Agent |
