| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: ordinary title in the sentence above for the reader's
information.
WHY HE CHANGED HIS MIND
Wagner, however, was not the man to allow his grip of a great
philosophic theme to slacken even in twenty-five years if the
theme still held good as a theory of actual life. If the history
of Germany from 1849 to 1876 had been the history of Siegfried
and Wotan transposed into the key of actual life Night Falls On
The Gods would have been the logical consummation of Das
Rheingold and The Valkyrie instead of the operatic anachronism it
actually is.
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde: LORD GORING. [Looking at himself in the glass.] Don't think I quite
like this buttonhole, Phipps. Makes me look a little too old. Makes
me almost in the prime of life, eh, Phipps?
PHIPPS. I don't observe any alteration in your lordship's
appearance.
LORD GORING. You don't, Phipps?
PHIPPS. No, my lord.
LORD GORING. I am not quite sure. For the future a more trivial
buttonhole, Phipps, on Thursday evenings.
PHIPPS. I will speak to the florist, my lord. She has had a loss in
her family lately, which perhaps accounts for the lack of triviality
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from 1984 by George Orwell: the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against
the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations,
sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still
alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea,
under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even--so it was
occasionally rumoured--in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of
Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face,
with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard--a
clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile
silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles
1984 |
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 Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: her motherhood. Hence a certain melancholy, a certain inexplicable
sadness which surprises men, who are one and all distracted from any
such concentration of their souls by the cares of life and the
continual necessity for action. All true love becomes to a woman an
active contemplation, which is more or less lucid, more or less
profound, according to her nature.
"Come, my dear, show your home to Monsieur Emile," said the countess,
whose mind was so pre-occupied that she forgot La Pechina, who was the
ostensible object of her visit.
The interior of the restored pavilion was in keeping with its
exterior. On the ground-floor the old divisions had been replaced, and
|
