| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: The very police reports, of which it sometimes forms the subject,
no longer are wanting in respect towards it. The words which
characterize it in administrative language are sonorous and dignified.
What used to be called a gut is now called a gallery; what used
to be called a hole is now called a surveying orifice. Villon would
no longer meet with his ancient temporary provisional lodging.
This net-work of cellars has its immemorial population of prowlers,
rodents, swarming in greater numbers than ever; from time to time,
an aged and veteran rat risks his head at the window of the sewer
and surveys the Parisians; but even these vermin grow tame,
so satisfied are they with their subterranean palace. The cesspool
Les Miserables |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: and pass the time, if I were sure to live for ever.
"That, if it had been my good fortune to come into the world a
STRULDBRUG, as soon as I could discover my own happiness, by
understanding the difference between life and death, I would
first resolve, by all arts and methods, whatsoever, to procure
myself riches. In the pursuit of which, by thrift and
management, I might reasonably expect, in about two hundred
years, to be the wealthiest man in the kingdom. In the second
place, I would, from my earliest youth, apply myself to the study
of arts and sciences, by which I should arrive in time to excel
all others in learning. Lastly, I would carefully record every
Gulliver's Travels |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: lips, as to whom I was for that matter much more in the dark than
she. I gasped, but my word had come: if she had lost her sight it
was in this very loss that she had found again her beauty. I
managed to speak while we were still alone, before her companion
had appeared. "You're lovelier at this day than you have ever been
in your life!" At the sound of my voice and that of the opening of
the door her impatience broke into audible joy. She sprang up,
recognising me, always holding me, and gleefully cried to a
gentleman who was arrested in the doorway by the sight of me: "He
has come back, he has come back, and you should have heard what he
says of me!" The gentleman was Geoffrey Dawling, and I thought it
|
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 Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: of the station, stop for a minute and rumble off again. After
walking a mile and a half I went back. Melancholy thoughts
haunted me still. Painful as it was to me, yet I remember I tried
as it were to make my thoughts still gloomier and more
melancholy. You know people who are vain and not very clever have
moments when the consciousness that they are miserable affords
them positive satisfaction, and they even coquet with their
misery for their own entertainment. There was a great deal of
truth in what I thought, but there was also a great deal that was
absurd and conceited, and there was something boyishly defiant
in my question: "What could happen worse?"
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories |
