| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll: to!"
"Three score years and ten, baldness, and spectacles, have their
advantages after all!", I said to myself. "Instead of a bashful youth
and maiden, gasping out monosyllables at awful intervals, here we have
an old man and a child, quite at their ease, talking as if they had
known each other for years! Then you think," I continued aloud,
"that we ought sometimes to ask a Ghost to sit down? But have we any
authority for it? In Shakespeare, for instance--there are plenty of
ghosts there--does Shakespeare ever give the stage-direction 'hands
chair to Ghost'?"
The lady looked puzzled and thoughtful for a moment: then she almost
Sylvie and Bruno |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence: sun in,' she said.
He slipped out of bed with his back to her, naked and white and thin,
and went to the window, stooping a little, drawing the curtains and
looking out for a moment. The back was white and fine, the small
buttocks beautiful with an exquisite, delicate manliness, the back of
the neck ruddy and delicate and yet strong.
There was an inward, not an outward strength in the delicate fine body.
'But you are beautiful!' she said. 'So pure and fine! Come!' She held
her arms out.
He was ashamed to turn to her, because of his aroused nakedness.
He caught his shirt off the floor, and held it to him, coming to her.
Lady Chatterley's Lover |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: the pretended picture. "I can see nothing here but a mass of confused
color, crossed by a multitude of eccentric lines, making a sort of
painted wall."
"We are mistaken. See!" returned Porbus.
Coming nearer, they perceived in a corner of the canvas the point of a
naked foot, which came forth from the chaos of colors, tones, shadows
hazy and undefined, misty and without form,--an enchanting foot, a
living foot. They stood lost in admiration before this glorious
fragment breaking forth from the incredible, slow, progressive
destruction around it. The foot seemed to them like the torso of some
Grecian Venus, brought to light amid the ruins of a burned city.
|
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 Youth by Joseph Conrad: went to sleep at last. I had faced the silence of the
East. I had heard some of its languages. But when I
opened my eyes again the silence was as complete as
though it had never been broken. I was lying in a
flood of light, and the sky had never looked so far, so
high, before. I opened my eyes and lay without moving.
"And then I saw the men of the East--they were
looking at me. The whole length of the jetty was
full of people. I saw brown, bronze, yellow faces,
the black eyes, the glitter, the color of an Eastern
crowd. And all these beings stared without a mur-
Youth |
