| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: the day fixed, the mistress and her two children came very late;
she made two excuses, first for her husband, who, as she said,
happened that very morning to SHNUWNH. The word is strongly
expressive in their language, but not easily rendered into
English; it signifies, "to retire to his first mother." Her
excuse for not coming sooner, was, that her husband dying late in
the morning, she was a good while consulting her servants about a
convenient place where his body should be laid; and I observed,
she behaved herself at our house as cheerfully as the rest. She
died about three months after.
They live generally to seventy, or seventy-five years, very
Gulliver's Travels |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from I Have A Dream by Martin Luther King, Jr.: we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous
decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro
slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice.
It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.
But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that
the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of
the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation
and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the
Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast
ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro
is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds
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