| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: took advantage, last evening, of the weakness of my brain to make a
fool of me, or else your brain is no more capable of standing the test
of the heady liquors of our native Latium, than mine is. I will assume
this latter hypothesis; I would rather doubt your digestion than your
heart. Be this as it may, henceforth I drink no more wine--for ever.
The abuse of good liquor last evening led me into much guilty folly.
When I remember that I very nearly----" He gave a glance of terror at
Marianna. "As to the wretched opera you took me to hear, I have
thought it over, and it is, after all, music written on ordinary
lines, a mountain of piled-up notes, /verba et voces/. It is but the
dregs of the nectar I can drink in deep draughts as I reproduce the
Gambara |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: exalted moments of his religious life, and strengthened in turn
his own religious life by this ideal. But the most exalted
religious tendency in his own consciousness was exactly that
comprehensive love, overpowering the evil only by the good, which
he therefore transferred to God as the fundamental tendency of
His nature." From this conception of God, observes Zeller, flowed
naturally all the moral teaching of Jesus, the insistence upon
spiritual righteousness instead of the mere mechanical observance
of Mosaic precepts, the call to be perfect even as the Father is
perfect, the principle of the spiritual equality of men before
God, and the equal duties of all men toward each other.
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Child of Storm by H. Rider Haggard: laugh at this tale of a petty flirtation. No, there was nothing to be
done except sit still and wait. Very possibly I was mistaken, after
all, and things would smooth themselves out, as they generally do.
Meanwhile the "reviewing," or whatever it may have been, was in
progress, and I was busy with my own affairs, making hay while the sun
shone. So great were the crowds of people who came up to Nodwengu that
in a week I had sold everything I had to sell in the two wagons, that
were mostly laden with cloth, beads, knives and so forth. Moreover, the
prices I got were splendid, since the buyers bid against each other, and
before I was cleared out I had collected quite a herd of cattle, also a
quantity of ivory. These I sent on to Natal with one of the wagons,
Child of Storm |
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 De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: Galilean peasant imagining that he could bear on his own shoulders
the burden of the entire world; all that had already been done and
suffered, and all that was yet to be done and suffered: the sins
of Nero, of Caesar Borgia, of Alexander VI., and of him who was
Emperor of Rome and Priest of the Sun: the sufferings of those
whose names are legion and whose dwelling is among the tombs:
oppressed nationalities, factory children, thieves, people in
prison, outcasts, those who are dumb under oppression and whose
silence is heard only of God; and not merely imagining this but
actually achieving it, so that at the present moment all who come
in contact with his personality, even though they may neither bow
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