| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: CHAPTER II
Besides a feeling of aloofness from everybody Natasha was feeling
a special estrangement from the members of her own family. All of
them- her father, mother, and Sonya- were so near to her, so familiar,
so commonplace, that all their words and feelings seemed an insult
to the world in which she had been living of late, and she felt not
merely indifferent to them but regarded them with hostility. She heard
Dunyasha's words about Peter Ilynich and a misfortune, but did not
grasp them.
"What misfortune? What misfortune can happen to them? They just live
their own old, quiet, and commonplace life," thought Natasha.
War and Peace |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Faith of Men by Jack London: worried by his growing sons who stood in need of a mother's care.
Then his eyes chanced upon Lit-lit.
"Lit-lit--well, she is Lit-lit," was the fashion in which he
despairingly described her to his chief clerk, Alexander McLean.
McLean was too fresh from his Scottish upbringing--"not dry behind
the ears yet," John Fox put it--to take to the marriage customs of
the country. Nevertheless he was not averse to the Factor's
imperilling his own immortal soul, and, especially, feeling an
ominous attraction himself for Lit-lit, he was sombrely content to
clinch his own soul's safety by seeing her married to the Factor.
Nor is it to be wondered that McLean's austere Scotch soul stood in
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