| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: On bright red roofs and walls;
The trees in the park exhale a ghost of rain;
We go from door to door in the streets again,
Talking, laughing, dreaming, turning our faces,
Recalling other times and places . . .
We crowd, not knowing why, around a gate,
We crowd together and wait,
A stretcher is carried out, voices are stilled,
The ambulance drives away.
We watch its roof flash by, hear someone say
'A man fell off the building and was killed--
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: treated as a thing observed, not experienced: nay, the disgust of
Hamlet at the drinking customs of Denmark is taken to establish
Shakespear as the superior of Alexander in self-control, and the
greatest of teetotallers.
Now this system of inventing your great man to start with, and then
rejecting all the materials that do not fit him, with the ridiculous
result that you have to declare that there are no materials at all
(with your waste-paper basket full of them), ends in leaving
Shakespear with a much worse character than he deserves. For though
it does not greatly matter whether he wrote the lousy Lucy lines or
not, and does not really matter at all whether he got drunk when he
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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 American Notes by Rudyard Kipling: assisted at the performance, and my curiosity was six times the
greatest. Indeed, I felt ashamed of showing it.
There were no more incidents till I reached the Palace Hotel, a
seven-storied warren of humanity with a thousand rooms in it.
All the travel books will tell you about hotel arrangements in
this country. They should be seen to be appreciated. Understand
clearly--and this letter is written after a thousand miles of
experiences--that money will not buy you service in the West.
When the hotel clerk--the man who awards your room to you and who
is supposed to give you information--when that resplendent
individual stoops to attend to your wants he does so whistling or
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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 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe: It happened to be a chance coach that I had taken up, which,
having been hired on purpose to carry some gentlemen to West
Chester who were going for Ireland, was now returning, and
did not tie itself to exact times or places as the stages did; so
that, having been obliged to lie still on Sunday, he had time to
get himself ready to come out, which otherwise he could not
have done.
However, his warning was so short, that he could not reach
to Stony-Stratford time enough to be with me at night, but he
met me at a place called Brickhill the next morning, as we
were just coming in to tow.
Moll Flanders |
