| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence: that the casual sex thing is nothing, compared to the long life lived
together? Don't you think one can just subordinate the sex thing to the
necessities of a long life? Just use it, since that's what we're driven
to? After all, do these temporary excitements matter? Isn't the whole
problem of life the slow building up of an integral personality,
through the years? living an integrated life? There's no point in a
disintegrated life. If lack of sex is going to disintegrate you, then
go out and have a love-affair. If lack of a child is going to
disintegrate you, then have a child if you possibly can. But only do
these things so that you have an integrated life, that makes a long
harmonious thing. And you and I can do that together...don't you
Lady Chatterley's Lover |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: to choose their cause for them, and to forbid them when there is no
cause. There is no suffering, no injustice, no misery, in the
earth, but the guilt of it lies with you. Men can bear the sight of
it, but you should not be able to bear it. Men may tread it down
without sympathy in their own struggle; but men are feeble in
sympathy, and contracted in hope; it is you only who can feel the
depths of pain, and conceive the way of its healing. Instead of
trying to do this, you turn away from it; you shut yourselves within
your park walls and garden gates; and you are content to know that
there is beyond them a whole world in wilderness--a world of secrets
which you dare not penetrate; and of suffering which you dare not
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: as yet to the Temple. As I have said, our frivolity covered certain
purposes which Juste has carried out, and which I am about to execute.
When we had done talking, we all three went out, cold as it was, to
walk in the Luxembourg gardens till the dinner hour. In the course of
that walk our conversation, grave throughout, turned on the painful
aspects of the political situation. Each of us contributed his
remarks, his comment, or his jest, a pleasantry or a proverb. This was
no longer exclusively a discussion of life on the colossal scale just
described by Marcas, the soldier of political warfare. Nor was it the
distressful monologue of the wrecked navigator, stranded in a garret
in the Hotel Corneille; it was a dialogue in which two well-informed
|
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 Paradise Lost by John Milton: Of thoughts revolved, his final sentence chose
Fit vessel, fittest imp of fraud, in whom
To enter, and his dark suggestions hide
From sharpest sight: for, in the wily snake
Whatever sleights, none would suspicious mark,
As from his wit and native subtlety
Proceeding; which, in other beasts observed,
Doubt might beget of diabolick power
Active within, beyond the sense of brute.
Thus he resolved, but first from inward grief
His bursting passion into plaints thus poured.
Paradise Lost |
