| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Lysis by Plato: ignorant, but are not yet hardened in their ignorance, or void of
understanding, and do not as yet fancy that they know what they do not
know: and therefore those who are the lovers of wisdom are as yet neither
good nor bad. But the bad do not love wisdom any more than the good; for,
as we have already seen, neither is unlike the friend of unlike, nor like
of like. You remember that?
Yes, they both said.
And so, Lysis and Menexenus, we have discovered the nature of friendship--
there can be no doubt of it: Friendship is the love which by reason of the
presence of evil the neither good nor evil has of the good, either in the
soul, or in the body, or anywhere.
Lysis |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from One Basket by Edna Ferber: for. Her wide mouth was capable of glorious insolences.
Whenever you heard shrieks of laughter from the girls' washroom
at noon you knew that Tessie was holding forth to an admiring
group. She was a born mimic; audacious, agile, and with the gift
of burlesque. The autumn that Angie Hatton came home from Europe
wearing the first tight skirt that Chippewa had ever seen, Tessie
gave an imitation of that advanced young woman's progress down
Grand Avenue in this restricting garment. The thing was cruel in
its fidelity, though containing just enough exaggeration to make
it artistic. She followed it up by imitating the stricken look
on the face of Mattie Haynes, cloak-and-suit buyer at Megan's,
One Basket |
