| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Taras Bulba and Other Tales by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: from one house to another, upon which hung Jewish stockings, short
trousers, and smoked geese. Sometimes a pretty little Hebrew face,
adorned with discoloured pearls, peeped out of an old window. A group
of little Jews, with torn and dirty garments and curly hair, screamed
and rolled about in the dirt. A red-haired Jew, with freckles all over
his face which made him look like a sparrow's egg, gazed from a
window. He addressed Yankel at once in his gibberish, and Yankel at
once drove into a court-yard. Another Jew came along, halted, and
entered into conversation. When Bulba finally emerged from beneath the
bricks, he beheld three Jews talking with great warmth.
Yankel turned to him and said that everything possible would be done;
Taras Bulba and Other Tales |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: his short gray overcoat under the other and sally forth. It
would then be growing light. Our horses were brought round, we
got on, and rode first to "the other house," or to the kennels to
get the dogs.
Agáfya Mikháilovna would be anxiously waiting
us on the steps. Despite the coldness of the morning, she would
be bareheaded and lightly clad, with her black jacket open,
showing her withered, old bosom. She carried the dog-collars in
her lean, knotted hands.
"Have you gone and fed them again?" asks my father,
severely, looking at the dogs' bulging stomachs.
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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 The Europeans by Henry James: he softly groaned. "Am I really losing you?"
She was touched--she was pained; but it had already occurred
to her that she might do something better than say so.
It would not have alleviated her companion's distress to perceive,
just then, whence she had sympathetically borrowed this ingenuity.
"I am not sorry for you," Gertrude said; "for in paying so much attention
to me you are following a shadow--you are wasting something precious.
There is something else you might have that you don't look at--
something better than I am. That is a reality!" And then,
with intention, she looked at him and tried to smile a little.
He thought this smile of hers very strange; but she turned away
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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 Phaedo by Plato: Let us then, in the first place, he said, be careful of allowing or of
admitting into our souls the notion that there is no health or soundness in
any arguments at all. Rather say that we have not yet attained to
soundness in ourselves, and that we must struggle manfully and do our best
to gain health of mind--you and all other men having regard to the whole of
your future life, and I myself in the prospect of death. For at this
moment I am sensible that I have not the temper of a philosopher; like the
vulgar, I am only a partisan. Now the partisan, when he is engaged in a
dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious
only to convince his hearers of his own assertions. And the difference
between him and me at the present moment is merely this--that whereas he
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