| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Enoch Arden, &c. by Alfred Tennyson: And shake the darkness from their loosen'd manes,
And beat the twilight into flakes of fire.
Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful
In silence, then before thine answer given
Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek.
Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,
And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,
In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?
`The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.'
Ay me! ay me! with what another heart
In days far-off, and with what other eyes
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: her painting very seriously; she was an independent little creature, and
Mrs Ramsay liked her for it; so, remembering her promise, she bent her
head.
4
Indeed, he almost knocked her easel over, coming down upon her with his
hands waving shouting out, "Boldly we rode and well," but, mercifully, he
turned sharp, and rode off, to die gloriously she supposed upon the
heights of Balaclava. Never was anybody at once so ridiculous and so
alarming. But so long as he kept like that, waving, shouting, she was
safe; he would not stand still and look at her picture. And that was what
Lily Briscoe could not have endured. Even while she looked at the mass,
To the Lighthouse |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: what you call the evil out of a child, it would drop dead. If you try
to stretch it to full human stature when it is ten years old, you will
simply pull it into two pieces and be hanged. And when you try to do
this morally, which is what parents and schoolmasters are doing every
day, you ought to be hanged; and some day, when we take a sensible
view of the matter, you will be; and serve you right. The child does
not stand between a good and a bad angel: what it has to deal with is
a middling angel who, in normal healthy cases, wants to be a good
angel as fast as it can without killing itself in the process, which
is a dangerous one.
Therefore there is no question of providing the child with a carefully
|
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 Scenes from a Courtesan's Life by Honore de Balzac: Tormented by such reflections, Esther scarcely listened to the music.
Still less, it may be believed, did she listen to the Baron, who held
one of his "Anchel's" hands in both his, talking to her in his
horrible Polish-Jewish accent, a jargon which must be as unpleasant to
read as it is to hear spoken.
"Esther," said he, releasing her hand, and pushing it away with a
slight touch of temper, "you do not listen to me."
"I tell you what, Baron, you blunder in love as you gibber in French."
"DER TEUFEL!"
"I am not in my boudoir here, I am at the opera. If you were not a
barrel made by Huret or Fichet, metamorphosed into a man by some trick
|
