| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Ebb-Tide by Stevenson & Osbourne: and do the dancing rooms and bars, and that, and wouldn't go
'ome till morning, till daylight doth appear. And the next day
I'd have water-cresses, 'am, muffin, and fresh butter; wouldn't I
just, O my!'
The clerk was interrupted by a fresh attack of coughing.
'Well, now, I'll tell you what I would do,' said the captain: 'I
would have none of your fancy rigs with the man driving from
the mizzen cross-trees, but a plain fore-and-aft hack cab of the
highest registered tonnage. First of all, I would bring up at the
market and get a turkey and a sucking-pig. Then I'd go to a
wine merchant's and get a dozen of champagne, and a dozen of
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity
lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.
Progress is the realisation of Utopias.
Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of
machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful
things will be made by the individual. This is not merely
necessary, but it is the only possible way by which we can get
either the one or the other. An individual who has to make things
for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their
wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put
into his work what is best in him. Upon the other hand, whenever a
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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 The Deputy of Arcis by Honore de Balzac: Monsieur de l'Estorade conveyed to your mind. As for Monsieur de
l'Estorade himself, I was, I confess, so annoyed at seeing the
careless manner in which he made himself the echo of a calumny against
which I felt he ought rather to have defended me that I did not
/deign/ to make any explanation to him. I now withdraw that word, but
it was then the true expression of a displeasure keenly felt.
In the course of my electoral contest, I have been obliged to make
public the justification I did not make to you; and I have had the
satisfaction of finding that men in masses are more capable than
individuals of understanding generous impulses and of distinguishing
the honest language of truth. Here are the facts which I related, 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 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: I walked out the back way--just as Gatsby had when he had made his
nervous circuit of the house half an hour before--and ran for a huge
black knotted tree, whose massed leaves made a fabric against the rain.
Once more it was pouring, and my irregular lawn, well-shaved by
Gatsby's gardener, abounded in small, muddy swamps and prehistoric
marshes. There was nothing to look at from under the tree except
Gatsby's enormous house, so I stared at it, like Kant at his church
steeple, for half an hour. A brewer had built it early in the "period."
craze, a decade before, and there was a story that he'd agreed to pay
five years' taxes on all the neighboring cottages if the owners would
have their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps their refusal took the
The Great Gatsby |
