| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from King Henry VI by William Shakespeare: I thought King Henry had resembled thee
In courage, courtship, and proportion;
But all his mind is bent to holiness,
To number Ave-Maries on his beads,
His champions are the prophets and apostles,
His weapons holy saws of sacred writ,
His study is his tilt-yard, and his loves
Are brazen images of canoniz'd saints.
I would the college of the cardinals
Would choose him pope and carry him to Rome,
And set the triple crown upon his head;
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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 Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: He still felt numb all over and as if she was much too close
to him.
"Any one can be interested!" she cried impatiently. "Your friend
Mr. Hirst's interested, I daresay. however, I do believe in you.
You look as if you'd got a nice sister, somehow." She paused,
picking at some sequins on her knees, and then, as if she had made up
her mind, she started off, "Anyhow, I'm going to ask your advice.
D'you ever get into a state where you don't know your own mind?
That's the state I'm in now. You see, last night at the dance
Raymond Oliver,--he's the tall dark boy who looks as if he had Indian
blood in him, but he says he's not really,--well, we were sitting
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Vision Splendid by William MacLeod Raine: "As if I believed that, as if you believed it yourself," she
scoffed.
Her pretty pouting lips, the long supple unbroken lines of the
soft sinuous body, were an invitation to forget all charms but
hers. He understood that she was throwing out her wiles,
consciously or unconsciously, to strike out from him a denial that
would convince her. His mounting vanity drove away his anger. He
forgot everything but her sheathed loveliness, the enticement of
this lovely creature whose smoldering eyes invited. Crossing the
room, he stood behind her divan and looked down at her with his
hands on the back of it.
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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 At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: limestone, full of minute fossil cephalopods, corals, echini,
and spirifera, and with occasional suggestions of siliceous sponges
and marine vertebrate bones - the latter probably of teleosts,
sharks, and ganoids. This, in itself, was important enough, as
affording the first vertebrate fossils the expedition had yet
secured; but when shortly afterward the drill head dropped through
the stratum into apparent vacancy, a wholly new and doubly intense
wave of excitement spread among the excavators. A good-sized blast
had laid open the subterrene secret; and now, through a jagged
aperture perhaps five feet across and three feet thick, there
yawned before the avid searchers a section of shallow limestone
At the Mountains of Madness |
