| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: mind we find there. As its language so clearly shows, it still is in
that early impersonal state to which we all awake first before we
become aware of that something we later know so well as self.
Particularly potent with these people is their language, for a
reason that also lends it additional interest to us,--because it is
their own. Among the mass of foreign thought the Japanese
imitativeness has caused the nation to adopt, here is one thing
which is indigenous. Half of the present speech, it is true, is of
Chinese importation, but conservatism has kept the other half pure.
From what it reveals we can see how each man starts to-day with the
same impersonal outlook upon life the race had reached centuries
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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 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth
and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games.
This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in
the shape of restlessness. He was never quite still; there was always a
tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand.
He saw me looking with admiration at his car.
"It's pretty, isn't it, old sport?" He jumped off to give me a better
view. "Haven't you ever seen it before?"
I'd seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream color, bright
with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with
triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a
The Great Gatsby |
