| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: Sebastian, gravely, returning with a tall and solemn figure.
"'Let me remove my hat. Now, venerable priest, further into the
light, and hold the Holy Book before me that I may touch it.
"'So help me Heaven, and on my honour the story I have told ye,
gentlemen, is in substance and its great items, true. I know it to
be true; it happened on this ball; I trod the ship; I knew the crew;
I have seen and talked with Steelkilt since the death of Radney.'"
CHAPTER 55
Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.
I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas,
something like the true form of the whale as he actually appears to
Moby Dick |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: her, and made her pull her skirts about her. And then, she recalled,
there was that sudden revivification, that sudden flare (when she
praised his boots), that sudden recovery of vitality and interest in
ordinary human things, which too passed and changed (for he was always
changing, and hid nothing) into that other final phase which was new to
her and had, she owned, made herself ashamed of her own irritability,
when it seemed as if he had shed worries and ambitions, and the hope of
sympathy and the desire for praise, had entered some other region, was
drawn on, as if by curiosity, in dumb colloquy, whether with himself or
another, at the head of that little procession out of one's range. An
extraordinary face! The gate banged.
To the Lighthouse |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Mistress Wilding by Rafael Sabatini: of any plotting, was impatient of his position, and a thought
contemptuous. It was he who, upon being ushered by the constable and
his men into the august presence of the Lord-Lieutenant, clamoured
to know precisely of what he was accused that he might straightway
clear himself.
Albemarle reared his great massive head, smothered in a mighty black
peruke, and scowled upon the florid London beau. A black-visaged
gentleman was Christopher Monk. His pendulous cheeks, it is true,
were of a sallow pallor, but what with his black wig, black eyebrows,
dark eyes, and the blue-black tint of shaven beard on his great jaw
and upper lip, he presented an appearance sombrely sinister. His
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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 The Pocket Diary Found in the Snow by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: this place where I am suffering, and where I shall die, perhaps.
There cannot be many who would buy such a pattern, and it must be
possible to find the factory where it was made. And I will also
write down here what I can see from my barred window. Far down
below me there is a rusty tin roof, it looks like as if it might
belong to a sort of shed. In front and to the right there are
windowless walls; to the left, at a little distance, I can see a
slender church spire, greenish in colour, probably covered with
copper, and before the church there are two poplar trees of
different heights.
"Another day has passed, a day of torturing fear! Am I really
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