| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Emerald City of Oz by L. Frank Baum: longer necessary, hurried forward to see what had happened.
After the clatter an intense stillness reigned in the town. The
strangers entered the first house they came to, which was also the
largest, and found the floor strewn with pieces of the people who
lived there. They looked much like fragments of wood neatly painted,
and were of all sorts of curious and fantastic shapes, no two pieces
being in any way alike.
They picked up some of these pieces and looked at them carefully. On
one which Dorothy held was an eye, which looked at her pleasantly but
with an interested expression, as if it wondered what she was going to
do with it. Quite near by she discovered and picked up a nose, and by
The Emerald City of Oz |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: on the evening before I began to write myself. I believe it was
a novel, and it is quite possible that it was one of Anthony
Trollope's novels. It is very likely. My acquaintance with him
was then very recent. He is one of the English novelists whose
works I read for the first time in English. With men of European
reputation, with Dickens and Walter Scott and Thackeray, it was
otherwise. My first introduction to English imaginative
literature was "Nicholas Nickleby." It is extraordinary how well
Mrs. Nickleby could chatter disconnectedly in Polish and the
sinister Ralph rage in that language. As to the Crummles family
and the family of the learned Squeers it seemed as natural to
A Personal Record |
