| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from 1984 by George Orwell: 'Do you know how long you have been here?'
'I don't know. Days, weeks, months--I think it is months.'
'And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?'
'To make them confess.'
'No, that is not the reason. Try again.'
'To punish them.'
'No!' exclaimed O'Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his
face had suddenly become both stern and animated. 'No! Not merely to
extract your confession, not to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have
brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand,
Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands
1984 |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: have occupied the minds of theologians in later ages; but they can hardly
be said to have found an answer. Professor Campbell well observes, that
the general spirit of the myth may be summed up in the words of the Lysis:
'If evil were to perish, should we hunger any more, or thirst any more, or
have any similar sensations? Yet perhaps the question what will or will
not be is a foolish one, for who can tell?' As in the Theaetetus, evil is
supposed to continue,--here, as the consequence of a former state of the
world, a sort of mephitic vapour exhaling from some ancient chaos,--there,
as involved in the possibility of good, and incident to the mixed state of
man.
Once more--and this is the point of connexion with the rest of the
Statesman |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett: Fosdick and I sat down, prepared to make the best of each other.
I soon discovered that she, like many of the elder women of the
coast, had spent a part of her life at sea, and was full of a good
traveler's curiosity and enlightenment. By the time we thought it
discreet to join our hostess we were already sincere friends.
You may speak of a visit's setting in as well as a tide's, and
it was impossible, as Mrs. Todd whispered to me, not to be
pleased at the way this visit was setting in; a new impulse and
refreshing of the social currents and seldom visited bays of memory
appeared to have begun. Mrs. Fosdick had been the mother of a
large family of sons and daughters,--sailors and sailors' wives,--
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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 Europeans by Henry James: Besides, I can't imagine."
He went on with her in silence; he was much more affected by what she
had told him than appeared. Ever since that evening of his return
from Newport her image had had a terrible power to trouble him.
What Clifford Wentworth had told him--that had affected him,
too, in an adverse sense; but it had not liberated him from
the discomfort of a charm of which his intelligence was impatient.
"She is not honest, she is not honest," he kept murmuring to himself.
That is what he had been saying to the summer sky, ten minutes before.
Unfortunately, he was unable to say it finally, definitively; and now
that he was near her it seemed to matter wonderfully little.
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