| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Crito by Plato: let me entreat you once more to take my advice and escape. For if you die
I shall not only lose a friend who can never be replaced, but there is
another evil: people who do not know you and me will believe that I might
have saved you if I had been willing to give money, but that I did not
care. Now, can there be a worse disgrace than this--that I should be
thought to value money more than the life of a friend? For the many will
not be persuaded that I wanted you to escape, and that you refused.
SOCRATES: But why, my dear Crito, should we care about the opinion of the
many? Good men, and they are the only persons who are worth considering,
will think of these things truly as they occurred.
CRITO: But you see, Socrates, that the opinion of the many must be
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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 Complete Poems of Longfellow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: The evening lamps, but, more divine,
The light of love shines over all;
Of love, that says not mine and thine,
But ours, for ours is thine and mine.
They want no guests, to come between
Their tender glances like a screen,
And tell them tales of land and sea,
And whatsoever may betide
The great, forgotten world outside;
They want no guests; they needs must be
Each other's own best company.
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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 Youth by Joseph Conrad: the carpenter--What is it?--Some accident--Submarine
volcano?--Coals, gas!--By Jove! we are being blown
up--Everybody's dead--I am falling into the after-
hatch--I see fire in it.'
"The coal-dust suspended in the air of the hold had
glowed dull-red at the moment of the explosion. In
the twinkling of an eye, in an infinitesimal fraction of a
second since the first tilt of the bench, I was sprawling
full length on the cargo. I picked myself up and scram-
bled out. It was quick like a rebound. The deck was a
wilderness of smashed timber, lying crosswise like trees in
Youth |
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 Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: connections with young men, have a few sous so as to be able to
go tippling with them, and meet them where students congregate?
And I had nothing! And no one in Paris can understand that
nothing means NOTHING. When I even thought of revealing my
beggary, I had that nervous contraction of the throat which makes
a sick man believe that a ball rises up from the oesophagus into
the larynx.
"In later life I have met people born to wealth who, never having
wanted for anything, had never even heard this problem in the
rule of three: A young man is to crime as a five-franc piece is
to X.--These gilded idiots say to me, 'Why did you get into debt?
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