| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: direction of the door, and my disappearance there-through.
It may be worth inquiring where I should have gone to. I should say
that practically every time I should have gone to a much more
educational place. I should have gone into the country, or into the
sea, or into the National Gallery, or to hear a band if there was one,
or to any library where there were no schoolbooks. I should have read
very dry and difficult books: for example, though nothing would have
induced me to read the budget of stupid party lies that served as a
text-book of history in school, I remember reading Robertson's Charles
V. and his history of Scotland from end to end most laboriously.
Once, stung by the airs of a schoolfellow who alleged that he had read
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: when he wanted to tell a lie, because he did not know, whereas you who are
the wise man, if you wanted to tell a lie would always and consistently
lie?
HIPPIAS: Yes, there you are quite right.
SOCRATES: Does the false man tell lies about other things, but not about
number, or when he is making a calculation?
HIPPIAS: To be sure; he would tell as many lies about number as about
other things.
SOCRATES: Then may we further assume, Hippias, that there are men who are
false about calculation and number?
HIPPIAS: Yes.
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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 Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: by fits and starts, during the past five or six years,
and may possibly finish in the course of five or six more.
The book is a story which details some passages in the life
of an ignorant village boy, Huck Finn, son of the town
drunkard of my time out west, there. He has run away from
his persecuting father, and from a persecuting good widow who
wishes to make a nice, truth-telling, respectable boy of him;
and with him a slave of the widow's has also escaped.
They have found a fragment of a lumber raft (it is high
water and dead summer time), and are floating down the river
by night, and hiding in the willows by day,--bound for Cairo,--
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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 The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain: and then she murmured, "Lead us not into t . . . but--but--we are so
poor, so poor! . . . Lead us not into . . . Ah, who would be hurt by
it?--and no one would ever know . . . Lead us . . . " The voice
died out in mumblings. After a little she glanced up and muttered
in a half-frightened, half-glad way -
"He is gone! But, oh dear, he may be too late--too late . . . Maybe
not--maybe there is still time." She rose and stood thinking,
nervously clasping and unclasping her hands. A slight shudder shook
her frame, and she said, out of a dry throat, "God forgive me--it's
awful to think such things--but . . . Lord, how we are made--how
strangely we are made!"
The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg |
