| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley: cries, which follow him, like avenging angels, through the dreadful
vaults.
He escaped into the fragrant open air, and the golden tropic
moonlight, and a garden which might have served as a model for
Eden; but man's hell followed into God's heaven, and still those
wails seemed to ring through his ears.
"Oh, misery, misery, misery!" murmured he to himself through
grinding teeth; "and I have brought her to this! I have had to
bring her to it! What else could I? Who dare blame me? And yet
what devilish sin can I have committed, that requires to be
punished thus? Was there no one to be found but me? No one? And
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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: exclaiming: "Look! Look!" so urgently that James also turned his head
to look over his shoulder at the island. They all looked. They looked
at the island.
But Cam could see nothing. She was thinking how all those paths and
the lawn, thick and knotted with the lives they had lived there, were
gone: were rubbed out; were past; were unreal, and now this was real;
the boat and the sail with its patch; Macalister with his earrings; the
noise of the waves--all this was real. Thinking this, she was
murmuring to herself, "We perished, each alone," for her father's words
broke and broke again in her mind, when her father, seeing her gazing
so vaguely, began to tease her. Didn't she know the points of the
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 To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: like that. He showed his uneasiness quite clearly now by saying, with
some irritation, that, anyhow, Scott (or was it Shakespeare ?) would
last him his lifetime. He said it irritably. Everybody, she thought,
felt a little uncomfortable, without knowing why. Then Minta Doyle,
whose instinct was fine, said bluffly, absurdly, that she did not
believe that any one really enjoyed reading Shakespeare. Mr Ramsay
said grimly (but his mind was turned away again) that very few people
liked it as much as they said they did. But, he added, there is
considerable merit in some of the plays nevertheless, and Mrs Ramsay
saw that it would be all right for the moment anyhow; he would laugh at
Minta, and she, Mrs Ramsay saw, realising his extreme anxiety about
To the Lighthouse |
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 Street of Seven Stars by Mary Roberts Rinehart: of sunken masts that were evergreen trees. The roads were masses
of slippery mud, up which the horses steamed and sweated. The
gray cloud fog hung over everything; the barking of a dog loomed
out of it near at hand where no dog was to be seen. Children
cried and wild birds squawked; one saw them not.
During the second night a landslide occurred on the side of the
mountain with a rumble like the noise of fifty trains. In the
morning, the rain clouds lifting for a moment, Marie saw the
narrow yellow line of the slip.
Everything was saturated with moisture. It did no good to close
the heavy wooden shutters at night: in the morning the air of the
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