| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas: My dear Athos, I wish, as your health absolutely requires it,
that you should rest for a fortnight. Go, then, and take the
waters of Forges, or any that may be more agreeable to you, and
recuperate yourself as quickly as possible.
Yours affectionate
De Treville
"Well, this leave of absence and that letter mean that you must
follow me, Athos."
"To the waters of Forges?"
"There or elsewhere."
"In the king's service?"
The Three Musketeers |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: brain seemed ablaze, he was visited by a sense of his fixed
identity, of his irreducible, inexpugnable SELFNESS, keener, more
insidious, more unescapable, than any sensation he had ever
known. He had not guessed that the mind was capable of such
intricacies of self-realization, of penetrating so deep into its
own dark windings. Often he woke from his brief snatches of
sleep with the feeling that something material was clinging to
him, was on his hands and face, and in his throat--and as his
brain cleared he understood that it was the sense of his own
loathed personality that stuck to him like some thick viscous
substance.
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: from the past, it can draw that only from the future. It cannot start
upon its work before it has stricken off all superstition concerning the
past. Former revolutions require historic reminiscences in order to
intoxicate themselves with their own issues. The revolution of the
nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to reach
its issue. With the former, the phrase surpasses the substance; with
this one, the substance surpasses the phrase.
The February revolution was a surprisal; old society was taken unawares;
and the people proclaimed this political stroke a great historic act
whereby the new era was opened. On the 2d of December, the February
revolution is jockeyed by the trick of a false player, and what is seer
|
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 Somebody's Little Girl by Martha Young: Because, in all that she knew or remembered or wondered about, there
was nothing at all about that strange thing that all the little
children, but herself, knew so well about--''Own-dear-sisters.''
Another strange thing came into her mind, brought into her mind
partly by her ears, but mostly by her eyes: There were not in this
new world on the high mountain--perhaps there were not after all so
many anywhere as she had thought--there were not so many Sisters
like Sister Helen Vincula (for was not Sister Helen Vincula the only
Sister she had seen on the mountain?). There were not after all so
many Sisters like Sister Angela; and Sister Mary Felice, who watched
the little blue-checked-apron girls playing in the sand; and Sister
|
