| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: water are carried from the karoo plains after thunderstorms.
Stoep - A porch.
I. DREAM LIFE AND REAL LIFE; A LITTLE AFRICAN STORY.
Little Jannita sat alone beside a milk-bush. Before her and behind her
stretched the plain, covered with red sand and thorny karoo bushes; and
here and there a milk-bush, looking like a bundle of pale green rods tied
together. Not a tree was to be seen anywhere, except on the banks of the
river, and that was far away, and the sun beat on her head. Round her fed
the Angora goats she was herding; pretty things, especially the little
ones, with white silky curls that touched the ground. But Jannita sat
crying. If an angel should gather up in his cup all the tears that have
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Animal Farm by George Orwell: was usually to make some cynical remark--for instance, he would say that
God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner
have had no tail and no flies. Alone among the animals on the farm he
never laughed. If asked why, he would say that he saw nothing to laugh at.
Nevertheless, without openly admitting it, he was devoted to Boxer; the
two of them usually spent their Sundays together in the small paddock
beyond the orchard, grazing side by side and never speaking.
The two horses had just lain down when a brood of ducklings, which had
lost their mother, filed into the barn, cheeping feebly and wandering from
side to side to find some place where they would not be trodden on. Clover
made a sort of wall round them with her great foreleg, and the ducklings
Animal Farm |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Scenes from a Courtesan's Life by Honore de Balzac: "I had made friends with some of the soldiers, to whom certain pious
persons had sent money, so they placed me so far off that only spent
balls reached me, and the men aimed at my back. This is a fact that
His Excellency the Ambassador can bear witness to----"
"This devil of a man has an answer for everything! However, so much
the better," thought Camusot, who assumed so much severity only to
satisfy the demands of justice and of the police. "How is it that a
man of your character," he went on, addressing the convict, "should
have been found in the house of the Baron de Nucingen's mistress--and
such a mistress, a girl who had been a common prostitute!"
"This is why I was found in a courtesan's house, monsieur," replied
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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 Polity of Athenians and Lacedaemonians by Xenophon: adornment is held to lie not in the costliness of the clothes they
wear, but in the healthy condition of the body to be clothed? Nor
again could there be much inducement to amass wealth, in order to be
able to expend it on the members of a common mess, where the
legislator had made it seem far more glorious that a man should help
his fellows by the labour of his body than by costly outlay. The
latter being, as he finely phrased it, the function of wealth, the
former an activity of the soul.
[1] See Plut. "Lycurg." 10 (Clough, i. 96).
He went a step further, and set up a strong barrier (even in a society
such as I have described) against the pursuance of money-making by
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