| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from New Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson: Things unaware:
Regard my breast, Lord, in Thy day,
And not my prayer.
My heart is evil in Thy sight:
My good thoughts flee:
O Lord, I cannot wish aright -
Wish Thou for me.
O bend my words and acts to Thee,
However ill,
That I, whate'er I say or be,
May serve Thee still.
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: important trivialities of love that are discussed, the assignations
held, the anecdotes and gossip that creep in. The theatre is an
inexpensive meeting-place for a whole society which is content and
amused with studying itself.
The men who are admitted take their seats on one of the sofas, in the
order of their arrival. The first comer naturally is next to the
mistress of the box, but when both seats are full, if another visitor
comes in, the one who has sat longest rises, takes his leave and
departs. All move up one place, and so each in turn is next the
sovereign.
This futile gossip, or serious colloquy, these elegant trivialities of
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: He slept in a warm room, in a soft bed covered with a quilt under
which there were fine clean sheets, but for some reason did not
feel comfortable: perhaps because the doctor and Von Taunitz
were, for a long time, talking in the adjoining room, and
overhead he heard, through the ceiling and in the stove, the
wind roaring just as in the Zemstvo hut, and as plaintively
howling: "Oo-oo-oo-oo!"
Von Taunitz's wife had died two years before, and he was still
unable to resign himself to his loss and, whatever he was talking
about, always mentioned his wife; and there was no trace of a
prosecutor left about him now.
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories |
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 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson: "Now, Alan, man!" cried James. "Look things in the face! He'll
be papered anyway; Mungo Campbell'll be sure to paper him; what
matters if I paper him too? And then, Alan, I am a man that has
a family." And then, after a little pause on both sides, "And,
Alan, it'll be a jury of Campbells," said he.
"There's one thing," said Alan, musingly, "that naebody kens his
name."
"Nor yet they shallnae, Alan! There's my hand on that," cried
James, for all the world as if he had really known my name and
was foregoing some advantage. "But just the habit he was in, and
what he looked like, and his age, and the like? I couldnae well
Kidnapped |
