| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain: humorous speech. I think I never heard so many old
played-out jokes strung together in my life. He was
worse than the minstrels, worse than the clown in the
circus. It seemed peculiarly sad to sit here, thirteen
hundred years before I was born, and listen again to
poor, flat, worm-eaten jokes that had given me the dry
gripes when I was a boy thirteen hundred years after-
wards. It about convinced me that there isn't any such
thing as a new joke possible. Everybody laughed at
these antiquities -- but then they always do; I had
noticed that, centuries later. However, of course the
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: of intelligence on the list. Yet experience--and experience
alone--has ended by acquainting us with the utter uselessness of
these objections. This is proved by the fact that at the present
day public prosecutors and barristers, at any rate those
belonging to the Parisian bar, have entirely renounced their
right to object to a juror; still, as M. des Glajeux remarks, the
verdicts have not changed, "they are neither better nor worse."
Like all crowds, juries are very strongly impressed by
sentimental considerations, and very slightly by argument. "They
cannot resist the sight," writes a barrister, "of a mother giving
its child the breast, or of orphans." "It is sufficient that a
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: At last the Tartars came on, and an innumerable company they were;
how many we could not tell, but ten thousand, we thought, at the
least. A party of them came on first, and viewed our posture,
traversing the ground in the front of our line; and, as we found
them within gunshot, our leader ordered the two wings to advance
swiftly, and give them a salvo on each wing with their shot, which
was done. They then went off, I suppose to give an account of the
reception they were like to meet with; indeed, that salute cloyed
their stomachs, for they immediately halted, stood a while to
consider of it, and wheeling off to the left, they gave over their
design for that time, which was very agreeable to our
Robinson Crusoe |
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 Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell: batteries poured shells into Atlanta, killing people in their
homes, ripping roofs off buildings, tearing huge craters in the
streets. The townsfolk sheltered as best they could in cellars, in
holes in the ground and in shallow tunnels dug in railroad cuts.
Atlanta was under siege.
Within eleven days after he had taken command, General Hood had
lost almost as many men as Johnston had lost in seventy-four days
of battle and retreat, and Atlanta was hemmed in on three sides.
The railroad from Atlanta to Tennessee was now in Sherman's hands
for its full length. His army was across the railroad to the east
and he had cut the railroad running southwest to Alabama. Only the
Gone With the Wind |
