| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: face to face, and that the world had become wonderful to my eyes--
too wonderful, perhaps, for in such mad worships there is peril,
the peril of losing them, no less than the peril of keeping them....
Weeks and weeks went on, and I grew more and more absorbed in you.
Then came a new development. I had drawn you as Paris in
dainty armour, and as Adonis with huntsman's cloak and polished
boar-spear. Crowned with heavy lotus-blossoms you had sat on
the prow of Adrian's barge, gazing across the green turbid Nile.
You had leaned over the still pool of some Greek woodland and seen
in the water's silent silver the marvel of your own face.
And it had all been what art should be--unconscious, ideal, and remote.
The Picture of Dorian Gray |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: of frozen salmon and stored blubber, and what the traps gave
them, but in December one of their hunters came across a tupik
(a skin-tent) of three women and a girl nearly dead, whose men
had come down from the far North and been crushed in their
little skin hunting-boats while they were out after the long-
horned narwhal. Kadlu, of course, could only distribute the
women among the huts of the winter village, for no Inuit dare
refuse a meal to a stranger. He never knows when his own turn
may come to beg. Amoraq took the girl, who was about fourteen,
into her own house as a sort of servant. From the cut of her
sharp-pointed hood, and the long diamond pattern of her white
The Second Jungle Book |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Human Drift by Jack London: longer these days. Life is not so precarious. The newborn infant
has a greater chance for survival than at any time in the past.
Surgery and sanitation reduce the fatalities that accompany the
mischances of life and the ravages of disease. Men and women,
with deficiencies and weaknesses that in the past would have
effected their rapid extinction, live to-day and father and mother
a numerous progeny. And high as the food-getting efficiency may
soar, population is bound to soar after it. "The abysmal
fecundity" of life has not altered. Given the food, and life will
increase. A small percentage of the billion and three-quarters
that live to-day may hush the clamour of life to be born, but it
|
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 The Apology by Xenophon: phrase?" Thus appealed to, Socrates replied: "Nay, solemnly I tell
you, twice already I have essayed to consider my defence, and twice
the divinity[9] hinders me"; and to the remark of Hermogenes, "That is
strange!" he answered again: "Strange, do you call it, that to God it
should seem better for me to die at once? Do you not know that up to
this moment I will not concede to any man to have lived a better life
than I have; since what can exceed the pleasure, which has been mine,
of knowing[10] that my whole life has been spent holily and justly?
And indeed this verdict of self-approval I found re-echoed in the
opinion which my friends and intimates have formed concerning me.[11]
And now if my age is still to be prolonged,[12] I know that I cannot
The Apology |
