| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde: Arnheim held out to you.
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN. Weak? Oh, I am sick of hearing that phrase.
Sick of using it about others. Weak? Do you really think, Arthur,
that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there
are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and
courage, to yield to. To stake all one's life on a single moment, to
risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure,
I care not - there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, a
terrible courage. I had that courage. I sat down the same afternoon
and wrote Baron Arnheim the letter this woman now holds. He made
three-quarters of a million over the transaction
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs: So Tarzan of the Apes did the only thing he knew to assure
Jane of her safety. He removed his hunting knife from its
sheath and handed it to her hilt first, again motioning her
into the bower.
The girl understood, and taking the long knife she entered
and lay down upon the soft grasses while Tarzan of the Apes
stretched himself upon the ground across the entrance.
And thus the rising sun found them in the morning.
When Jane awoke, she did not at first recall the strange
events of the preceding day, and so she wondered at her odd
surroundings--the little leafy bower, the soft grasses of her
Tarzan of the Apes |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: that rose above her continent of streets and dwellings to the sky?
Couldn't he feel that England, his old enemy and old mother, bowed and
stricken and struggling, was opening her arms to him wide? She's a person
who hides her tears even from herself; but it seems to me that, with a
drop of imagination and half a drop of thought, he might have discovered
a year and a half after a few street roughs had insulted him, that they
were not all England. With two drops of thought it might even have
ultimately struck him that here we came, late, very late, indeed, only
just in time, from a country untouched, unafflicted, unbombed, safe,
because of England's ships, to tired, broken, bleeding England; and that
the sight of us, so jaunty, so fresh, so innocent of suffering and
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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 Touchstone by Edith Wharton: their burden. There was something fatuous in an attitude of
sentimental apology toward a memory already classic: to reproach
one's self for not having loved Margaret Aubyn was a good deal
like being disturbed by an inability to admire the Venus of Milo.
From her cold niche of fame she looked down ironically enough on
his self-flagellations. . . . It was only when he came on
something that belonged to her that he felt a sudden renewal of
the old feeling, the strange dual impulse that drew him to her
voice but drove him from her hand, so that even now, at sight of
anything she had touched, his heart contracted painfully. It
happened seldom nowadays. Her little presents, one by one, had
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