| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: present in connection with the main respiratory system, but they
presented anomalies beyond immediate solution. Articulate speech,
in the sense of syllable utterance, seemed barely conceivable,
but musical piping notes covering a wide range were highly probable.
The muscular system was almost prematurely developed.
The nervous
system was so complex and highly developed as to leave Lake aghast.
Though excessively primitive and archaic in some respects, the
thing had a set of ganglial centers and connectives arguing the
very extremes of specialized development. Its five-lobed brain
was surprisingly advanced, and there were signs of a sensory equipment,
At the Mountains of Madness |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: During his childhood he had known few women, save his mother, and
that kind, God-fearing woman his stepmother, who did so much to
make his childhood hopeful and happy. No man ever honored women
more truly than did Abraham Lincoln; while all the qualities that
caused men to like him--his strength, his ambition, his
kindliness--served equally to make him a favorite with them. In
the years of his young manhood three women greatly occupied his
thoughts. The first was the slender, fair-haired Ann Rutledge,
whom he very likely saw for the first time as she stood with the
group of mocking people on the river-bank, near her father's
mill, the day Lincoln's flatboat stuck on the dam at New Salem.
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: Where are we now? What are those high hills, far away to the
left, above the lowlands and woods?
Those are the shore of the Old World--the Welsh mountains.
And in front of us I can see nothing but flat land. Where is
that?
That is the mouth of the Severn and Avon; where we shall be in
half an hour more.
And there, on the right, over the low hills, I can see higher
ones, blue and hazy.
Those are an island of the Old World, called now the Mendip Hills;
and we are steaming along the great strait between the Mendips and
|
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 Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: has something radically distinct to contribute to the wisdom of the race.
We, today, take all labour for our province! We seek to enter the non-
sexual fields of intellectual or physical toil, because we are unable to
see today, with regard to them, any dividing wall raised by sex which
excludes us from them. We are yet equally determined to enter those in
which sex difference does play its part, because it is here that woman, the
bearer of the race, must stand side by side with man, the begetter; if a
completed human wisdom, an insight that misses no aspect of human life, and
an activity that is in harmony with the entire knowledge and the entire
instinct of the entire human race, is to exist. It is here that the man
cannot act for the woman nor the woman for the man; but both must interact.
|
