| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: You will say, perhaps, I am too sensitive, that sights as painful
abound in cancer hospitals and are confronted daily by doctors and
nurses. I have long learned to admire and envy the doctors and the
nurses. But there is no cancer hospital so large and populous as
Kalawao and Kalaupapa; and in such a matter every fresh case, like
every inch of length in the pipe of an organ, deepens the note of
the impression; for what daunts the onlooker is that monstrous sum
of human suffering by which he stands surrounded. Lastly, no
doctor or nurse is called upon to enter once for all the doors of
that gehenna; they do not say farewell, they need not abandon hope,
on its sad threshold; they but go for a time to their high calling,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: birds for miles round. Then Kaa came straight, quickly, and
anxious to kill. The fighting strength of a python is in the
driving blow of his head backed by all the strength and weight of
his body. If you can imagine a lance, or a battering ram, or a
hammer weighing nearly half a ton driven by a cool, quiet mind
living in the handle of it, you can roughly imagine what Kaa was
like when he fought. A python four or five feet long can knock a
man down if he hits him fairly in the chest, and Kaa was thirty
feet long, as you know. His first stroke was delivered into the
heart of the crowd round Baloo. It was sent home with shut mouth
in silence, and there was no need of a second. The monkeys
The Jungle Book |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: not exactly an easy matter to deliver my message. For divers
reasons into which I need not enter, I had barely sufficient
money to take me to Moulins. However, my youthful enthusiasm
determined to hasten thither on foot as fast as possible. Bad
news travels swiftly, and I wished to be first at the chateau. I
asked for the shortest way, and hurried through the field paths
of the Bourbonnais, bearing, as it were, a dead man on my back.
The nearer I came to the Chateau de Montpersan, the more aghast I
felt at the idea of my strange self-imposed pilgrimage. Vast
numbers of romantic fancies ran in my head. I imagined all kinds
of situations in which I might find this Comtesse de Montpersan,
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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 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: under the same sky of ribbed cloud as that he beheld,
through which the moon showed its position rather than its shape,
and one or two of the larger stars made themselves visible
as faint nebulae only. It was a new beginning of Sue's history.
He projected his mind into the future, and saw her with
children more or less in her own likeness around her.
But the consolation of regarding them as a continuation of her
identity was denied to him, as to all such dreamers, by the
wilfulness of Nature in not allowing issue from one parent alone.
Every desired renewal of an existence is debased by being
half alloy. "If at the estrangement or death of my lost love,
Jude the Obscure |
