| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Almayer's Folly by Joseph Conrad: humanity, regardless of his entreaties for a passage, insensible
to his gentle pushes as he tried to work his way through it
towards the riverside.
In the midst of his gentle and slow progress he fancied suddenly
he had heard his wife's voice in the thickest of the throng. He
could not mistake very well Mrs. Almayer's high-pitched tones,
yet the words were too indistinct for him to understand their
purport. He paused in his endeavours to make a passage for
himself, intending to get some intelligence from those around
him, when a long and piercing shriek rent the air, silencing the
murmurs of the crowd and the voices of his informants. For a
Almayer's Folly |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: Winks out, returns again, climbs and descends,
Gleams on a clock, a glass, shrinks back to darkness;
And then at last, in the chaos of that place,
Dazzles like frozen fire on your clear face.
Well, I have found you. We have met at last.
Now you shall not escape me: in your eyes
I see the horrible huddlings of your past,--
All you remember blackens, utters cries,
Reaches far hands and faint. I hold the light
Close to your cheek, watch the pained pupils shrink,--
Watch the vile ghosts of all you vilely think . . .
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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 Mother by Owen Wister: said: 'I hate that woman.'"
"'Hate her? Why, you have never so much as laid eyes on her.'"
"'That is not at all necessary. I consider it indecent for a grey haired
woman with grandchildren to be speculating in the stock market every week
like a regular bull or bear.'"
"Every point in this outburst of Ethel's seemed to me so unwarrantable
that I was quite dazed. I sat looking at her, and her eyes filled with
tears. 'Oh Richard!' she exclaimed, 'she will ruin you, and I hate her!'"
"'My dear Ethel,' I replied, 'she will not. And only see how you are
making it all up out of your head. You have never seen her, but you speak
of her as a grey-haired grandmother.'"
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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 Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov: quotation, but the by no means complicated theory of the
circulation of the blood, for instance, is as much a mystery to
him now as it was twenty years ago.
At the table in my study, bending low over some book or
preparation, sits Pyotr Ignatyevitch, my demonstrator, a modest
and industrious but by no means clever man of five-and-thirty,
already bald and corpulent; he works from morning to night, reads
a lot, remembers well everything he has read -- and in that way
he is not a man, but pure gold; in all else he is a carthorse or,
in other words, a learned dullard. The carthorse characteristics
that show his lack of talent are these: his outlook is narrow and
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