| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Voice of the City by O. Henry: for me to eat in. Don't believe it, do you?
"Without the slightest trouble," said Vallance,
with a laugh. "I lunched there yesterday. To-
night I couldn't buy a five-cent cup of coffee."
"You don't look like one of us. Well, I guess those
things happen. I used to be a high-flyer myself
years ago. What knocked you out of the game?"
"I -- oh, I lost my job," said Vallance.
"It's undiluted Hades, this city," went on the
other. "One day you're eating from china; the
next you are eating in China -- a chop-suey joint.
The Voice of the City |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe: me downward to the grave, though nobody regards it. I have seen
this, long. St. Clare, you will see, after a while, that I was right."
"Which will afford you great consolation, no doubt!" said
St. Clare, in a dry, bitter tone.
Marie lay back on a lounge, and covered her face with her
cambric handkerchief.
Eva's clear blue eye looked earnestly from one to the other.
It was the calm, comprehending gaze of a soul half loosed from its
earthly bonds; it was evident she saw, felt, and appreciated, the
difference between the two.
She beckoned with her hand to her father. He came and sat
Uncle Tom's Cabin |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson: whatever cost annihilate the cause of it; so that he played
alternately the ostrich and the bull. It is to this strenuous
cowardice of pain that I have to set down all the unfortunate and
excessive steps of his subsequent career. Certainly this was the
reason of his beating McManus, the groom, a thing so much out of
all his former practice, and which awakened so much comment at the
time. It is to this, again, that I must lay the total lose of near
upon two hundred pounds, more than the half of which I could have
saved if his impatience would have suffered me. But he preferred
loss or any desperate extreme to a continuance of mental suffering.
All this has led me far from our immediate trouble: whether he
|
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 Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: reasoning, the pictures.
"'How many times have I tormented myself in this way,' I thought
(I recalled previous and similar fits of jealousy), 'and then
seen it end in nothing at all? It is the same now. Perhaps,
yes, surely, I shall find her quietly sleeping. She will awaken,
she will be glad, and in her words and looks I shall see that
nothing has happened, that all this is vain. Ah, if it would
only so turn out!' 'But no, that has happened too often! Now the
end has come,' a voice said to me.
"And again it all began. Ah, what torture! It is not to a
hospital filled with syphilitic patients that I would take a
The Kreutzer Sonata |
