| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Complete Angler by Izaak Walton: And fair Aurora, lifting up her head,
Still blushing, rise from old Tithonus' bed.
The hills and mountains raised from the plains,
The plains extended level with the ground
The grounds divided into sundry veins,
The veins inclos'd with rivers running round;
These rivers making way through nature's chains,
With headlong course, into the sea profound;
The raging sea, beneath the vallies low,
Where lakes, and rills, and rivulets do flow:
The lofty woods, the forests wide and long,
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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 Iliad by Homer: communities, according to their tribes, and were dearly loved by
Jove, the lord of gods and men; wherefore the son of Saturn
showered down great riches upon them.
And Nireus brought three ships from Syme--Nireus, who was the
handsomest man that came up under Ilius of all the Danaans after
the son of Peleus--but he was a man of no substance, and had but
a small following.
And those that held Nisyrus, Crapathus, and Casus, with Cos, the
city of Eurypylus, and the Calydnian islands, these were
commanded by Pheidippus and Antiphus, two sons of King Thessalus
the son of Hercules. And with them there came thirty ships.
The Iliad |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Mansion by Henry van Dyke: and the single-minded energy with which he improved them.
But in the paternal philosophy there was something that
disquieted
and oppressed the young man, and made him gasp inwardly for fresh
air
and free action.
At times, during his college course and his years at the law
school,
he had yielded to this impulse and broken away--now toward
extravagance
and dissipation, and then, when the reaction came, toward a
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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 This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald: trying to get him inside a door and slam it behind him. After
that door was slammed there would be only footfalls and white
buildings in the moonlight, and perhaps he would be one of the
footfalls.
During the five or ten minutes he waited in the shadow of the
fence, there was somehow this fire ... that was as near as he
could name it afterward. He remembered calling aloud:
"I want some one stupid. Oh, send some one stupid!" This to the
black fence opposite him, in whose shadows the footsteps shuffled
... shuffled. He supposed "stupid" and "good" had become somehow
intermingled through previous association. When he called thus it
This Side of Paradise |
