| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Human Drift by Jack London: is no other land for those millions to farm. And after every such
catastrophe the wave of human life rolls up and now millions flood
out upon that precarious territory. They are driven to it,
because they are pressed remorselessly against subsistence. It is
inevitable that China, sooner or later, like Japan, will learn and
put into application our own superior food-getting efficiency.
And when that time comes, it is likewise inevitable that her
population will increase by unguessed millions until it again
reaches the saturation point. And then, inoculated with Western
ideas, may she not, like Japan, take sword in hand and start forth
colossally on a drift of her own for more room? This is another
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: although he made white men to be slaveholders, he did not make
them to be _bad_ slaveholders, and that, in due time, he would
punish the bad slaveholders; that he would, when they died, send
them to the bad place, where they would be "burnt up."
Nevertheless, I could not reconcile the relation of slavery with
my crude notions of goodness.
Then, too, I found that there were puzzling exceptions to this
theory of slavery on both sides, and in the middle. I knew of
blacks who were _not_ slaves; I knew of whites who were _not_
slaveholders; and I knew of persons who were _nearly_ white, who
were slaves. _Color_, therefore, was a very unsatisfactory basis
My Bondage and My Freedom |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Heroes by Charles Kingsley: (5)
And they passed the Scythian archers, and the Tauri who eat
men, and the wandering Hyperboreai, who feed their flocks
beneath the pole-star, until they came into the northern
ocean, the dull dead Cronian Sea. (6) And there ARGO would
move on no longer; and each man clasped his elbow, and leaned
his head upon his hand, heart-broken with toil and hunger,
and gave himself up to death. But brave Ancaios the helmsman
cheered up their hearts once more, and bade them leap on
land, and haul the ship with ropes and rollers for many a
weary day, whether over land, or mud, or ice, I know not, for
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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 Jolly Corner by Henry James: unspeakable moment not doubted he was dead.
"It must have been that I WAS." He made it out as she held him.
"Yes - I can only have died. You brought me literally to life.
Only," he wondered, his eyes rising to her, "only, in the name of
all the benedictions, how?"
It took her but an instant to bend her face and kiss him, and
something in the manner of it, and in the way her hands clasped and
locked his head while he felt the cool charity and virtue of her
lips, something in all this beatitude somehow answered everything.
"And now I keep you," she said.
"Oh keep me, keep me!" he pleaded while her face still hung over
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