| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain: and a chat, and there we sat just as sociable, and talking away
and laughing and chatting, just the same as if we had been born
in the same bunk; and all the servants in the anteroom could see
us doing it! Oh, it was too lovely for anything!"
The king, class Q, is happy in the modest entertainment furnished him
by the king, class M, and goes home and tells the household about it,
and is as grateful and joyful over it as were his predecessors
in the gaudier attentions that had fallen to their larger lot.
Emperors, kings, artisans, peasants, big people, little people--at the
bottom we are all alike and all the same; all just alike on the inside,
and when our clothes are off, nobody can tell which of us is which.
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: endless nunneries and monasteries, have never been able to extirpate nor
seriously to weaken for one moment the master dominance of this emotion;
that the lowest and most brutal ignorance, and the highest intellectual
culture leave mankind, equally, though in different forms, amenable to its
mastery; that, whether in the brutal guffaw of sex laughter which rings
across the drinking bars of our modern cities, and rises from the
comfortable armchairs in fashionable clubs; or in the poet's dreams, and
the noblest conjugal relations of men and women linked together for life,
it plays still today on earth the vast part it played when hoary monsters
ploughed after each other through Silurian slime, and that still it forms
as ever the warp on which in the loom of human life the web is woven, and
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Tin Woodman of Oz by L. Frank Baum: "Yes; so far, but no farther," returned the Tin
Woodman in a plaintive and disturbed tone of voice. "I
am now close to Nimmie Amee, whom I have come ever so
far to seek, but I cannot ask the girl to marry such a
little man as I am now."
"I'm no bigger than a toy soldier!" said Captain
Fyter, sorrowfully. "Unless Polychrome can make us big
again, there is little use in our visiting Nimmie Amee
at all, for I'm sure she wouldn't care for a husband
she might carelessly step on and ruin."
Polychrome laughed merrily.
The Tin Woodman of Oz |
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 A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain: This is about the customary table d'ho^te bill in summer:
Soup (characterless).
Fish--sole, salmon, or whiting--usually tolerably good.
Roast--mutton or beef--tasteless--and some last year's potatoes.
A pa^te, or some other made dish--usually good--"considering."
One vegetable--brought on in state, and all alone--usually
insipid lentils, or string-beans, or indifferent asparagus.
Roast chicken, as tasteless as paper.
Lettuce-salad--tolerably good.
Decayed strawberries or cherries.
Sometimes the apricots and figs are fresh, but this is
|
