| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Extracts From Adam's Diary by Mark Twain: She has taken up with a snake now. The other animals are glad,
for she was always experimenting with them and bothering them;
and I am glad, because the snake talks, and this enables me to
get a rest.
Friday
She says the snake advises her to try the fruit of that tree, and
says the result will be a great and fine and noble education. I
told her there would be another result, too--it would introduce
death into the world. That was a mistake--it had been better to
keep the remark to myself; it only gave her an idea--she could
save the sick buzzard, and furnish fresh meat to the despondent
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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 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.
But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism.
We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the
working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of
ruling as to win the battle of democracy.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy top wrest, by
degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all
instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the
proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the
total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by
The Communist Manifesto |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: two first of them, however, they were entirely mistaken, for we had no
droughty season, but in the beginning of the year a hard frost, which
lasted from December almost to March, and after that moderate
weather, rather warm than hot, with refreshing winds, and, in short,
very seasonable weather, and also several very great rains.
Some endeavours were used to suppress the printing of such books
as terrified the people, and to frighten the dispersers of them, some of
whom were taken up; but nothing was done in it, as I am informed,
the Government being unwilling to exasperate the people, who were,
as I may say, all out of their wits already.
Neither can I acquit those ministers that in their sermons rather sank
A Journal of the Plague Year |
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 Octopus by Frank Norris: through the group that surrounded her son, sank on her knees
beside him, moaning, in compassion and terror.
Harran lay straight and rigid upon the floor, his head propped by
a pillow, his coat that had been taken off spread over his chest.
One leg of his trousers was soaked through and through with
blood. His eyes were half-closed, and with the regularity of a
machine, the eyeballs twitched and twitched. His face was so
white that it made his yellow hair look brown, while from his
opened mouth, there issued that loud and terrible sound of
guttering, rasping, laboured breathing that gagged and choked and
gurgled with every inhalation.
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