| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: were still in heart to fight, or were so heartily beaten as to be
discouraged, and so he might manage accordingly. This stratagem
took: for as soon as the savages heard the first gun, and saw the
flash of the second, they started up upon their feet in the
greatest consternation imaginable; and as our men advanced swiftly
towards them, they all ran screaming and yelling away, with a kind
of howling noise, which our men did not understand, and had never
heard before; and thus they ran up the hills into the country.
At first our men had much rather the weather had been calm, and
they had all gone away to sea: but they did not then consider that
this might probably have been the occasion of their coming again in
Robinson Crusoe |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Lesson of the Master by Henry James: It was true she had had no ground - he hadn't named his intention
of absence. He had kept his counsel for want of due assurance: it
was that particular visit that was, the next thing, to settle the
matter. He had paid the visit to see how much he really cared for
her, and quick departure, without so much as an explicit farewell,
was the sequel to this enquiry, the answer to which had created
within him a deep yearning. When he wrote her from Clarens he
noted that he owed her an explanation (more than three months
after!) for not having told her what he was doing.
She replied now briefly but promptly, and gave him a striking piece
of news: that of the death, a week before, of Mrs. St. George.
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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 The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: the realization of his hopes, it almost seemed as though the flames
that devoured his soul were issuing from his nostrils.
The inspired feelings that animate great men shone forth on the pale
face furrowed with wrinkles, on the brow haggard with care like that
of an old monarch, but above all they gleamed in the sparkling eye,
whose fires were fed by chastity imposed by the tyranny of ideas and
by the inward consecration of a great intellect. The cavernous eyes
seemed to have sunk in their orbits through midnight vigils and the
terrible reaction of hopes destroyed, yet ceaselessly reborn. The
zealous fanaticism inspired by an art or a science was evident in this
man; it betrayed itself in the strange, persistent abstraction of his
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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 Turn of the Screw by Henry James: to me by the fact that she was disturbed neither by my reillumination
nor by the haste I made to get into slippers and into a wrap.
Hidden, protected, absorbed, she evidently rested on the sill--
the casement opened forward--and gave herself up. There was a great
still moon to help her, and this fact had counted in my quick decision.
She was face to face with the apparition we had met at the lake,
and could now communicate with it as she had not then been able to do.
What I, on my side, had to care for was, without disturbing her,
to reach, from the corridor, some other window in the same quarter.
I got to the door without her hearing me; I got out of it, closed it,
and listened, from the other side, for some sound from her.
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