| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: shape is distorted, and one blunders, now with the sun in one's eyes,
now with a dark shadow, he sought an image to cool and detach and round
off his feeling in a concrete shape. Suppose then that as a child
sitting helpless in a perambulator, or on some one's knee, he had seen
a waggon crush ignorantly and innocently, some one's foot? Suppose he
had seen the foot first, in the grass, smooth, and whole; then the
wheel; and the same foot, purple, crushed. But the wheel was innocent.
So now, when his father came striding down the passage knocking them up
early in the morning to go to the Lighthouse down it came over his
foot, over Cam's foot, over anybody's foot. One sat and watched it.
But whose foot was he thinking of, and in what garden did all this
 To the Lighthouse |
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 Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: her plum-coloured satin with pale blue side-panels, and
blue ostrich plumes in a small satin bonnet, met with
general approval; but before she had settled herself
with a stately rustle in the pew opposite Mrs. Archer's
the spectators were craning their necks to see who was
coming after her. Wild rumours had been abroad the
day before to the effect that Mrs. Manson Mingott, in
spite of her physical disabilities, had resolved on being
present at the ceremony; and the idea was so much in
keeping with her sporting character that bets ran high
at the clubs as to her being able to walk up the nave
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