| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Nana, Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille by Emile Zola: impressed them. What a genius that Irma was! A sight like this
gave you a rattling notion of the woman! The trees stretched away
and away, and there were endlessly recurrent patches of ivy along
the wall with glimpses of lofty roofs and screens of poplars
interspersed with dense masses of elms and aspens. Was there no end
to it then? The ladies would have liked to catch sight of the
mansion house, for they were weary of circling on and on, weary of
seeing nothing but leafy recesses through every opening they came
to. They took the rails of the gate in their hands and pressed
their faces against the ironwork. And thus excluded and isolated, a
feeling of respect began to overcome them as they thought of the
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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 Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield: took out his cigarette case, but remembering how the mater hated him to
smoke in his bedroom, put it back again and drifted over to the chest of
drawers. No, he was dashed if he could think of one blessed thing in his
favour, while she...Ah!...He stopped dead, folded his arms, and leaned hard
against the chest of drawers.
And in spite of her position, her father's wealth, the fact that she was an
only child and far and away the most popular girl in the neighbourhood; in
spite of her beauty and her cleverness--cleverness!--it was a great deal
more than that, there was really nothing she couldn't do; he fully
believed, had it been necessary, she would have been a genius at anything--
in spite of the fact that her parents adored her, and she them, and they'd
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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 Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: 52. In the Jewish "Old Testament," the book of divine justice,
there are men, things, and sayings on such an immense scale, that
Greek and Indian literature has nothing to compare with it. One
stands with fear and reverence before those stupendous remains of
what man was formerly, and one has sad thoughts about old Asia
and its little out-pushed peninsula Europe, which would like, by
all means, to figure before Asia as the "Progress of Mankind." To
be sure, he who is himself only a slender, tame house-animal, and
knows only the wants of a house-animal (like our cultured people
of today, including the Christians of "cultured" Christianity),
need neither be amazed nor even sad amid those ruins--the taste
Beyond Good and Evil |
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 Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: a fricasse of an army, caissons, transports, artillery and all, in
such snow as that and under such a pitiless sky. It was so cold that
you burned your hand on the barrel of your gun if you happened to
touch it. There it was that the pontooners saved the army, for the
pontooners stood firm at their posts; it was there that Gondrin
behaved like a hero, and he is the sole survivor of all the men who
were dogged enough to stand in the river so as to build the bridges on
which the army crossed over, and so escaped the Russians, who still
respected the Grand Army on account of its past victories. And Gondrin
is an accomplished soldier," he went on, pointing to his friend, who
was gazing at him with the rapt attention peculiar to deaf people, "a
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