| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: She was not embarrassed by her ragged clothes, and treated us as if we
were old acquaintances. Even then I noticed the unusual colour of her eyes--
a shade of deep violet--and their soft, confiding expression.
Chris Lingard was not a very successful farmer, and he had a large family.
Lena was always knitting stockings for little brothers and sisters,
and even the Norwegian women, who disapproved of her, admitted that she was
a good daughter to her mother. As Tony said, she had been talked about.
She was accused of making Ole Benson lose the little sense he had--
and that at an age when she should still have been in pinafores.
Ole lived in a leaky dugout somewhere at the edge of the settlement.
He was fat and lazy and discouraged, and bad luck had become a habit
My Antonia |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: air. Possibly he may actually have been ordained. But he never told
me that or anything else about his affairs; and his black pessimism
would have shot him violently out of any church at present established
in the West. We never talked about affairs: we talked about
Shakespear, and the Dark Lady, and Swift, and Koheleth, and the
cycles, and the mysterious moments when a feeling came over us that
this had happened to us before, and about the forgeries of the
Pentateuch which were offered for sale to the British Museum, and
about literature and things of the spirit generally. He always came
to my desk at the Museum and spoke to me about something or other, no
doubt finding that people who were keen on this sort of conversation
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