| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare: So Priam's trust false Sinon's tears doth flatter,
That he finds means to burn his Troy with water.'
Here, all enrag'd, such passion her assails,
That patience is quite beaten from her breast.
She tears the senseless Sinon with her nails,
Comparing him to that unhappy guest
Whose deed hath made herself herself detest;
At last she smilingly with this gives o'er;
'Fool, fool!' quoth she, 'his wounds will not be sore.'
Thus ebbs and flows the current of her sorrow,
And time doth weary time with her complaining.
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Before Adam by Jack London: the brows and bringing the hair down from the top of
the head until each hair stood apart and pointed
straight forward.
The sight chilled me, but I mastered my fear, and, with
a stone poised in my hand, threatened him back. He
still tried to advance. I drove the stone down at him
and made a sheer miss. The next shot was a success.
The stone struck him on the neck. He slipped back out
of sight, but as he disappeared I could see him
clutching for a grip on the wall with one hand, and
with the other clutching at his throat. The stick fell
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: `The manager sends me--' he began in an official tone, and stopped short.
`Good God!' he said, glaring at the wounded man.
"We two whites stood over him, and his lustrous and inquiring
glance enveloped us both. I declare it looked as though he would
presently put to us some questions in an understandable language;
but he died without uttering a sound, without moving a limb,
without twitching a muscle. Only in the very last moment, as though
in response to some sign we could not see, to some whisper we could
not hear, he frowned heavily, and that frown gave to his black
death-mask an inconeivably sombre, brooding, and menacing expression.
The lustre of inquiring glance faded swiftly into vacant glassiness.
Heart of Darkness |
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 Marie by H. Rider Haggard: constitution--and three Meyers, being the husband of the poor woman I
had seen committed to the grave and two of her six children. The rest,
Hernan Pereira excepted, had died of fever and actual starvation, for
when the fever lessened with the change of the seasons, the starvation
set in. It appeared that, with the exception of a very little, they had
stored their powder in a kind of outbuilding which they constructed,
placing it at a distance for safety's sake. When most of the surviving
men were away, however, a grass fire set light to this outbuilding and
all the powder blew up.
After this, for a while they supplied the camp with food by the help of
such ammunition as remained to them. When that failed they dug pits in
Marie |
