| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce: distant or near by -- it seemed both. Its recurrence was
regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death knell. He
awaited each new stroke with impatience and -- he knew not
why -- apprehension. The intervals of silence grew
progressively longer; the delays became maddening. With
their greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength
and sharpness. They hurt his ear like the trust of a knife;
he feared he would shriek. What he heard was the ticking of
his watch.
He unclosed his eyes and saw again the water below him. "If
I could free my hands," he thought, "I might throw off the
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: him the energy to continue it. He was intimate with a number of men,
more particularly with the roues of the Bourse, men who, since the
revolution, have set up the principle that robbery done on a large
scale is only a SMIRCH to the reputation,--transferring thus to
financial matters the loose principles of love in the eighteenth
century. Diard now became a sort of business man, and concerned
himself in several of those affairs which are called SHADY in the
slang of the law-courts. He practised the decent thievery by which so
many men, cleverly masked, or hidden in the recesses of the political
world, make their fortunes,--thievery which, if done in the streets by
the light of an oil lamp, would see a poor devil to the galleys, but,
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