| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The First Men In The Moon by H. G. Wells: with infinite doubt and suspicion. I felt the compulsion of their eyes
intolerably. I groaned aloud.
"I can't! " I shouted. "I tell you I can't! I'm not equal to it! You must
puzzle and - and be damned to you!"
I gesticulated convulsively. He receded a step as though I had threatened
him. I made a bolt through them into the hotel. I charged back into the
coffee-room, rang the bell furiously. I gripped the waiter as he entered.
"D'ye hear?" I shouted. "Get help and carry these bars up to my room right
away."
He failed to understand me, and I shouted and raved at him. A
scared-looking little old man in a green apron appeared, and further two
The First Men In The Moon |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from O Pioneers! by Willa Cather: shivering from one frozen garden patch to an-
other and are hard put to it to find frost-bitten
cabbage-stalks. At night the coyotes roam the
wintry waste, howling for food. The variegated
fields are all one color now; the pastures, the
stubble, the roads, the sky are the same leaden
gray. The hedgerows and trees are scarcely per-
ceptible against the bare earth, whose slaty hue
they have taken on. The ground is frozen so
hard that it bruises the foot to walk in the roads
or in the ploughed fields. It is like an iron
O Pioneers! |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: of type in that declining race; but the likeness was swallowed up
in difference. I remembered how it had seemed to me a thing
unapproachable in the life, a creature rather of the painter's
craft than of the modesty of nature, and I marvelled at the
thought, and exulted in the image of Olalla. Beauty I had seen
before, and not been charmed, and I had been often drawn to women,
who were not beautiful except to me; but in Olalla all that I
desired and had not dared to imagine was united.
I did not see her the next day, and my heart ached and my eyes
longed for her, as men long for morning. But the day after, when I
returned, about my usual hour, she was once more on the gallery,
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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 The Crisis in Russia by Arthur Ransome: that such work is necessary for the general good, and in all
he wrote and spoke about it he emphasized the fact that
people worked better and harder when working thus than
under any of the conditions (piece-work, premiums for good
work, etc.) imposed by the revolution in its desperate
attempts to raise the productivity of labor. For this reason
alone, he wrote, the first "Saturdaying" on the Moscow-Kazan
railway was an event of historical significance, and not for
Russia alone.
Whether Lenin was right or wrong in so thinking, "Saturdayings"
became a regular institution, like Dorcas meetings in Victorian
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