| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: very time when men appear engaged in revolutionizing things and
themselves, in bringing about what never was before, at such very epochs
of revolutionary crisis do they anxiously conjure up into their service
the spirits of the past, assume their names, their battle cries, their
costumes to enact a new historic scene in such time-honored disguise and
with such borrowed language Thus did Luther masquerade as the Apostle
Paul; thus did the revolution of 1789-1814 drape itself alternately as
Roman Republic and as Roman Empire; nor did the revolution of 1818 know
what better to do than to parody at one time the year 1789, at another
the revolutionary traditions of 1793-95 Thus does the beginner, who has
acquired a new language, keep on translating it back into his own mother
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: found any colored man weak enough to believe such stuff.
Nevertheless, the increase of knowledge was attended with bitter,
as well as sweet results. The more I read, the more I was led to
abhor and detest slavery, and my enslavers. "Slaveholders,"
thought I, "are only a band of successful robbers, who left their
homes and went into Africa for the purpose of stealing and
reducing my people to slavery." I loathed them as the meanest
and the most wicked of men. As I read, behold! the very
discontent so graphically pre<125 MY EYES OPENED>dicted by Master
Hugh, had already come upon me. I was no longer the light-
hearted, gleesome boy, full of mirth and play, as when I landed
My Bondage and My Freedom |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: We. He understood to admiration the art of abandoning himself to
the influence of a woman; he was always clever enough to make her
believe that he trembled like some boy fresh from college before
his first partner at a dance, when he asks her, "Do you like
dancing?" But, no less, he could be terrible at need, could
unsheathe a formidable sword and make short work of Commandants.
Banter lurked beneath his simplicity, mocking laughter behind his
tears--for he had tears at need, like any woman nowadays who says
to her husband, "Give me a carriage, or I shall go into a
consumption."
For the merchant the world is a bale of goods or a mass of
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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 Charmides and Other Poems by Oscar Wilde: A mighty billow rose up suddenly
Upon whose oily back the clotted foam
Lay diapered in some strange fantasy,
And clasping him unto its glassy breast
Swept landward, like a white-maned steed upon a venturous quest!
Now where Colonos leans unto the sea
There lies a long and level stretch of lawn;
The rabbit knows it, and the mountain bee
For it deserts Hymettus, and the Faun
Is not afraid, for never through the day
Comes a cry ruder than the shout of shepherd lads at play.
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