| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Adieu by Honore de Balzac: theatre.
"Savages!" he cried, "it was I who gave you the idea of that raft. I
have saved you, and you deny me a place."
A confused murmur answered him. The men at the edge of the raft, armed
with long sticks, pressed with violence against the shore to send off
the frail construction with sufficient impetus to force its way
through corpses and ice-floes to the other shore.
"Thunder of heaven! I'll sweep you into the water if you don't take
the major and his two companions," cried the stalwart grenadier, who
swung his sabre, stopped the departure, and forced the men to stand
closer in spite of furious outcries.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad: the shooting of a burglar forbade him, under the circumstances, even
as much as a thought of murder. Nevertheless, he clenched his fists
and set his teeth hard. And he was afraid at the same time. He was
afraid with that penetrating faltering fear that seems, in the very
middle of a beat, to turn one's heart into a handful of dust. The
contamination of her crime spread out, tainted the universe, tainted
himself; woke up all the dormant infamies of the world; caused a
ghastly kind of clairvoyance in which he could see the towns and
fields of the earth, its sacred places, its temples and its houses,
peopled by monsters--by monsters of duplicity, lust, and murder. She
was a monster--he himself was thinking monstrous thoughts . . . and
Tales of Unrest |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Cruise of the Jasper B. by Don Marquis: And standing with a frown on his face until every vestige of the
smile had died from Mr. Goldberg's lips, Cleggett repeated once
more: "A schooner, Mr. Goldberg!"
"Yes, sir--there's no doubt of it--a schooner, Mr. Cleggett,"
said Mr. Goldberg, turning pale and backing away from the door.
The ordinary man inspects a house or a horse first and buys it,
or fails to buy it, afterward; but genius scorns conventions;
Cleggett was not an ordinary man; he often moved straight towards
his object by inspiration; great poets and great adventurers
share this faculty; Cleggett paid for the Jasper B. first and
went back to inspect his purchase later.
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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 Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: "They were too, too dreadful?"
"Too, too dreadful--some of them."
She looked at him a minute, and there came to him as he met it, an
inconsequent sense that her eyes, when one got their full
clearness, were still as beautiful as they had been in youth, only
beautiful with a strange cold light--a light that somehow was a
part of the effect, if it wasn't rather a part of the cause, of the
pale hard sweetness of the season and the hour. "And yet," she
said at last, "there are horrors we've mentioned."
It deepened the strangeness to see her, as such a figure in such a
picture, talk of "horrors," but she was to do in a few minutes
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