| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Forged Coupon by Leo Tolstoy: as payment, she looked closely at all the school-
boys who came in her way in the streets. One
day she met Mahin, but did not recognise him,
for on seeing her he made a face which quite
changed his features. But when, a fortnight after
the incident with the coupon, she met Mitia
Smokovnikov face to face, she knew him at once.
She let him pass her, then turned back and
followed him, and arriving at his house she made
inquiries as to whose son he was. The next day
she went to the school and met the divinity
The Forged Coupon |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: property, that YOU can keep it?
"'And you told me of this criminal act in a room filled with the
mute witnesses of our love; and you are a gentleman, and you think
yourself noble, and I am yours! I try to find excuses for you; I
do find them in your youth and thoughtlessness. I know there is
still something of the child about you. Perhaps you have never
thought seriously of what fortune and integrity are. Oh! how your
laugh wounded me. Reflect on that ruined family, always in
distress; poor young girls who have reason to curse you daily; an
old father saying to himself each night: "We might not now be
starving if that man's father had been an honest man--"'"
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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 Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: its depth the third and most solemn character in which our life is
like those clouds of heaven; that to it belongs not only their
transcience, not only their mystery, but also their power; that in
the cloud of the human soul there is a fire stronger than the
lightning, and a grace more precious than the rain; and that though
of the good and evil it shall one day be said alike, that the place
that knew them knows them no more, there is an infinite separation
between those whose brief presence had there been a blessing, like
the mist of Eden that went up from the earth to water the garden,
and those whose place knew them only as a drifting and changeful
shade, of whom the heavenly sentence is, that they are "wells
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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 Last War: A World Set Free by H. G. Wells: of the seeker had revealed to them, were charming them out of
those ancient and instinctive preoccupations from which the very
threat of hell and torment had failed to drive them. And this
young man, homeless and without provision even for the immediate
hours, in the presence of social disorganisation, distress, and
perplexity, in a blazing wilderness of thoughtless pleasure that
blotted out the stars, could think as he tells us he thought.
'I saw life plain,' he wrote. 'I saw the gigantic task before
us, and the very splendour of its intricate and immeasurable
difficulty filled me with exaltation. I saw that we have still
to discover government, that we have still to discover education,
The Last War: A World Set Free |
