| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Call of the Canyon by Zane Grey: But he was farther away. The clearness of his voice had deceived her.
Presently she espied him a little distance away, across a creek she had not
before noticed.
"Come on," he called. "I want to see you cross the stepping stones."
Carley ran ahead, down a little slope of clean red rock, to the shore of
the green water. It was clear, swift, deep in some places and shallow in
others, with white wreathes or ripples around the rocks evidently placed
there as a means to cross. Carley drew back aghast.
"Glenn, I could never make it," she called.
"Come on, my Alpine climber," he taunted. "Will you let Arizona daunt you?"
"Do you want me to fall in and catch cold?" she cried, desperately.
The Call of the Canyon |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: He had summed up--he had judged. `The horror!' He was a remarkable man.
After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour,
it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper,
it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth--the strange commingling
of desire and hate. And it is not my own extremity I remember best--
a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain,
and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things--even of this
pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through.
True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge,
while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot.
And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom,
Heart of Darkness |
