| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad: to make another landing."
"Yes, it is a fact that before many hours I will be sailing away
from you to try my luck once more."
"Your wonderful luck," she breathed out.
"Oh, yes, I am wonderfully lucky. Unless the luck really is yours
- in having found somebody like me, who cares at the same time so
much and so little for what you have at heart."
"What time will you be leaving the harbour?" she asked.
"Some time between midnight and daybreak. Our men may be a little
late in joining, but certainly we will be gone before the first
streak of light."
The Arrow of Gold |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: Chillingworth -- the secret poison of his malignity, infecting
all the air about him -- and his authorised interference, as a
physician, with the minister's physical and spiritual infirmities
-- that these bad opportunities had been turned to a cruel
purpose. By means of them, the sufferer's conscience had been
kept in an irritated state, the tendency of which was, not to
cure by wholesome pain, but to disorganize and corrupt his
spiritual being. Its result, on earth, could hardly fail to be
insanity, and hereafter, that eternal alienation from the Good
and True, of which madness is perhaps the earthly type.
The Scarlet Letter |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: of that spirit of intrigue that is fertile in resource and
device; their good genius is chance; they do not invent, things
come to them.
"At night I went home, at the very moment when my fellow lodger
also came in--a water-carrier named Bourgeat, a native of Saint-
Flour. We knew each other as two lodgers do who have rooms off
the same landing, and who hear each other sleeping, coughing,
dressing, and so at last become used to one another. My neighbor
informed me that the landlord, to whom I owed three quarters'
rent, had turned me out; I must clear out next morning. He
himself was also turned out on account of his occupation. I spent
|
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 Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: As a rule, the town was on a spacious grin for a while, but there
were places in it where the grin did not appear, and where it was
dangerous to refer to the ex-convict's letter.
A word of explanation. 'Jack Hunt,' the professed writer of the letter,
was an imaginary person. The burglar Williams--Harvard graduate,
son of a minister--wrote the letter himself, to himself: got it smuggled
out of the prison; got it conveyed to persons who had supported and
encouraged him in his conversion--where he knew two things would happen:
the genuineness of the letter would not be doubted or inquired into;
and the nub of it would be noticed, and would have valuable effect--
the effect, indeed, of starting a movement to get Mr. Williams pardoned
|
