| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Awakening & Selected Short Stories by Kate Chopin: that hair must be parted and brushed.
In short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman. The
motherwomen seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to
know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when
any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They
were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands,
and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as
individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.
Many of them were delicious in the role; one of them was the
embodiment of every womanly grace and charm. If her husband did
not adore her, he was a brute, deserving of death by slow torture.
Awakening & Selected Short Stories |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson: Where the Little People are;
Where the clover-tops are trees,
And the rain-pools are the seas,
And the leaves, like little ships,
Sail about on tiny trips;
And above the Daisy tree
Through the grasses,
High o'erhead the Bumble Bee
Hums and passes.
In that forest to and fro
I can wander, I can go;
A Child's Garden of Verses |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: appear; and sought, without finding them, the transient furrows made
by the ploughshare of civilization. Humanity floated on the surface of
the earth as a ship whose wake is lost in the calm level of ocean.
These were the fundamental notions set forth in Doctor Sigier's
address, all wrapped in the mystical language and strange school Latin
of the time. He had made a special study of the Scriptures, and they
supplied him with the weapons with which he came before his
contemporaries to hasten their progress. He hid his boldness under his
immense learning, as with a cloak, and his philosophical bent under a
saintly life. At this moment, after bringing his hearers face to face
with God, after packing the universe into an idea, and almost
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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 Russia in 1919 by Arthur Ransome: mostly by the Germans, now mostly by yourselves, by the
Roumanians, by the Poles, and in some districts by the
Germans still. Troops fighting on the Ural front are fighting
a month later south of Voronezh, and a month later again
are having a holiday, marching on the heels of the Germans
as they evacuate the occupied provinces. Some of our
troops are not yet much good. One day they fight, and the
next they think they would rather not. So that our best
troops, those in which there are most workmen, have to be
flung in all directions. We are at work all the time enabling
this to be done, and making new roads to enable it to be
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