| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by William and Ellen Craft: by General Wade Hampton, for ten years, in doing
nothing but breaking 'em in; and everybody knows
that the General would not have a man that didn't
understand his business. So I tell ye, stranger,
again, you had better sell, and let me take him
down to Orleans. He will do you no good if you
take him across Mason's and Dixon's line; he is
a keen nigger, and I can see from the cut of his
eye that he is certain to run away." My master
said, "I think not, sir; I have great confidence in
his fidelity." "FiDEVIL," indignantly said the dealer,
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence: Then he sat thinking.
'Ay!' he said. 'You're right. It's that really. It's that all the way
through. I knew it with the men. I had to be in touch with them,
physically, and not go back on it. I had to be bodily aware of them and
a bit tender to them, even if I put em through hell. It's a question of
awareness, as Buddha said. But even he fought shy of the bodily
awareness, and that natural physical tenderness, which is the best,
even between men; in a proper manly way. Makes 'em really manly, not so
monkeyish. Ay! it's tenderness, really; it's cunt-awareness. Sex is
really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it's touch we're
afraid of. We're only half-conscious, and half alive. We've got to come
Lady Chatterley's Lover |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Virginian by Owen Wister: of smoke against the evening sky And now my lost trunk came back
into my thoughts, and Medicine Bow seemed a lonely spot. A sort
of ship had left me marooned in a foreign ocean; the Pullman was
comfortably steaming home to port, while I--how was I to find
Judge Henry's ranch? Where in this unfeatured wilderness was Sunk
Creek? No creek or any water at all flowed here that I could
perceive. My host had written he should meet me at the station
and drive me to his ranch. This was all that I knew. He was not
here. The baggage-man had not seen him lately. The ranch was
almost certain to be too far to walk to, to-night. My trunk--I
discovered myself still staring dolefully after the vanished
The Virginian |
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 Paz by Honore de Balzac: knows where to sit down among carved Chinese work-tables with their
myriads of fantastic figures inlaid in ivory, cups of yellow topaz
mounted on filagree, mosaics which inspire theft, Dutch pictures in
the style which Schinner has adopted, angels such as Steinbock
conceived but often could not execute, statuettes modelled by genius
pursued by creditors (the real explanation of the Arabian myth),
superb sketches by our best artists, lids of chests made into panels
alternating with fluted draperies of Italian silk, portieres hanging
from rods of old oak in tapestried masses on which the figures of some
hunting scene are swarming, pieces of furniture worthy to have
belonged to Madame de Pompadour, Persian rugs, et cetera. For a last
|
