| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne: curiosity to examine a gold ingot weighing some seven or eight pounds.
He took it up, scrutinised it, passed it to his neighbour, he to the next man,
and so on until the ingot, going from hand to hand, was transferred to the end
of a dark entry; nor did it return to its place for half an hour. Meanwhile,
the cashier had not so much as raised his head. But in the present instance
things had not gone so smoothly. The package of notes not being found when
five o'clock sounded from the ponderous clock in the "drawing office,"
the amount was passed to the account of profit and loss. As soon as
the robbery was discovered, picked detectives hastened off to Liverpool,
Glasgow, Havre, Suez, Brindisi, New York, and other ports, inspired by
the proffered reward of two thousand pounds, and five per cent. on the sum
Around the World in 80 Days |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Burning Daylight by Jack London: the undertaking, and he was the only other present at the sacred
function of lighting the first fire. By removing a partition,
Daylight had thrown two rooms into one, and this was the big
living-room where Dede's treasures were placed--her books, and
paintings and photographs, her piano, the Crouched Venus, the
chafing-dish and all its glittering accessories. Already, in
addition to her own wild-animal skins, were those of deer and
coyote and one mountain-lion which Daylight had killed. The
tanning he had done himself, slowly and laboriously, in frontier
fashion.
He handed the match to Dede, who struck it and lighted the fire.
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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 Myths and Myth-Makers by John Fiske: feather-dresses and mermaid caps and werewolf-girdles may best
be sought in the etymology of words like the German leichnam,
in which the body is described as a garment of flesh for the
soul.[93] In the naive philosophy of primitive thinkers, the
soul, in passing from one visible shape to another, had only
to put on the outward integument of the creature in which it
wished to incarnate itself. With respect to the mode of
metamorphosis, there is little difference between the werewolf
and the swan-maiden; and the similarity is no less striking
between the genesis of the two conceptions. The original
werewolf is the night-wind, regarded now as a manlike deity
Myths and Myth-Makers |
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 The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: of the station, stop for a minute and rumble off again. After
walking a mile and a half I went back. Melancholy thoughts
haunted me still. Painful as it was to me, yet I remember I tried
as it were to make my thoughts still gloomier and more
melancholy. You know people who are vain and not very clever have
moments when the consciousness that they are miserable affords
them positive satisfaction, and they even coquet with their
misery for their own entertainment. There was a great deal of
truth in what I thought, but there was also a great deal that was
absurd and conceited, and there was something boyishly defiant
in my question: "What could happen worse?"
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories |
