| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald: thought by question and suggestion, and Amory talked with an
ingenious brilliance of a thousand impulses and desires and
repulsions and faiths and fears. He and Monsignor held the floor,
and the older man, with his less receptive, less accepting, yet
certainly not colder mentality, seemed content to listen and bask
in the mellow sunshine that played between these two. Monsignor
gave the effect of sunlight to many people; Amory gave it in his
youth and, to some extent, when he was very much older, but never
again was it quite so mutually spontaneous.
"He's a radiant boy," thought Thornton Hancock, who had seen the
splendor of two continents and talked with Parnell and Gladstone
This Side of Paradise |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Black Dwarf by Walter Scott: the being demanded by what right he intruded himself on those
hills, and destroyed their harmless inhabitants. The perplexed
stranger endeavoured to propitiate the incensed dwarf, by
offering to surrender his game, as he would to an earthly Lord of
the Manor. The proposal only redoubled the offence already taken
by the dwarf, who alleged that he was the lord of those
mountains, and the protector of the wild creatures who found a
retreat in their solitary recesses; and that all spoils derived
from their death, or misery, were abhorrent to him. The hunter
humbled himself before the angry goblin, and by protestations of
his ignorance, and of his resolution to abstain from such
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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 Where There's A Will by Mary Roberts Rinehart: by Mr. Moody. They selected their words from one of Horace
Fletcher's books, and as Mr. Pierce wasn't either over or
underweight, they asked him to be referee.
Oh, they were crazy about him by that time. It was "Mr. Carter"
here and "dear Mr. Carter" there, with the women knitting him
neckties and the men coming up to be bullied and asking for more.
And he kept the upper hand, too, once he got it. It was that
day, I think, that he sent Senator Biggs up to make his bed
again, and nobody in the place will ever forget how he made old
Mr. Jennings hang his gymnasium suit up three times before it was
done properly. The old man was mad enough at the time, but
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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 Gorgias by Plato: rather do all the evil which he can and escape? And in this way the
greatest of all evils will befall him. 'But this imitator of the tyrant,'
rejoins Callicles, 'will kill any one who does not similarly imitate him.'
Socrates replies that he is not deaf, and that he has heard that repeated
many times, and can only reply, that a bad man will kill a good one. 'Yes,
and that is the provoking thing.' Not provoking to a man of sense who is
not studying the arts which will preserve him from danger; and this, as you
say, is the use of rhetoric in courts of justice. But how many other arts
are there which also save men from death, and are yet quite humble in their
pretensions--such as the art of swimming, or the art of the pilot? Does
not the pilot do men at least as much service as the rhetorician, and yet
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