| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft: But dusk
was now thick, and the great carven face looked down even sterner
in shadow. Perched on that ledge night found the seeker; and in
the blackness he might neither go down nor go up, but only stand
and cling and shiver in that narrow place till the day came, praying
to keep awake lest sleep loose his hold and send him down the
dizzy miles of air to the crags and sharp rocks of the accursed
valley. The stars came out, but save for them there was only black
nothingness in his eyes; nothingness leagued with death, against
whose beckoning he might do no more than cling to the rocks and
lean back away from an unseen brink. The last thing of earth that
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: he had had for years so fine a point of contact was a woman whom
Acton Hague, of all men in the world, had more or less fashioned.
Such as she sat there to-day she was ineffaceably stamped with him.
Beneficent, blameless as Stransom held her, he couldn't rid himself
of the sense that he had been, as who should say, swindled. She
had imposed upon him hugely, though she had known it as little as
he. All this later past came back to him as a time grotesquely
misspent. Such at least were his first reflexions; after a while
he found himself more divided and only, as the end of it, more
troubled. He imagined, recalled, reconstituted, figured out for
himself the truth she had refused to give him; the effect of which
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: "Parisian" is here used merely to generalize our remark.
Therefore, if you should say to an individual of the species
Practical, "Do you know Madame Firmiani?" he would present that lady
to your mind by the following inventory: "Fine house in the rue du
Bac, salons handsomely furnished, good pictures, one hundred thousand
francs a year, husband formerly receiver-general of the department of
Montenotte." So saying, the Practical man, rotund and fat and usually
dressed in black, will project his lower lip and wrap it over the
upper, nodding his head as if to add: "Solid people, those; nothing to
be said against them." Ask no further; Practical men settle
everybody's status by figures, incomes, or solid acres,--a phrase 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 United States Declaration of Independence: which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring
Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government,
and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once
an example and fit instrument for introducing the same
absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws,
United States Declaration of Independence |
