| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Market-Place by Harold Frederic: yet Thorpe even now, when they stood brusquely silent
before him, with their carefully-brushed hats pulled
down over their eyes, stuck to it in his own mind
that it was hard to tell them apart. To the end,
there was something impersonal in his feeling toward them.
They, for their part, coldly abstained from exhibiting
a sign of feeling about him, good, bad, or indifferent.
It was the man with the fair hair and little curly flaxen
beard who spoke: "How do you do! I understand that we can
buy eight thousand five hundred Rubber Consols from you
at 'twenty-three.'"
The Market-Place |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the
face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their
tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of
Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have
assembled in London, and sketched the following Manifesto, to be
published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and
Danish languages.
I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history
of class struggles.
The Communist Manifesto |
| 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 Man by Oscar Wilde: pleasant, and decent conditions. Such a view would have been wrong
there and then, and would, of course, be still more wrong now and
in England; for as man moves northward the material necessities of
life become of more vital importance, and our society is infinitely
more complex, and displays far greater extremes of luxury and
pauperism than any society of the antique world. What Jesus meant,
was this. He said to man, 'You have a wonderful personality.
Develop it. Be yourself. Don't imagine that your perfection lies
in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is
inside of you. If only you could realise that, you would not want
to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches
|
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 Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: snow-capped mountains. I was bewildered and amazed, having heard
nothing of this great beauty. The town when entered is quite
eastern. The streets are formed of open stalls under the first
story, in which squat tailors, cooks, sherbet vendors and the like,
busy at their work or smoking narghilehs. Cloths stretched from
house to house keep out the sun. Mules rattle through the crowd;
curs yelp between your legs; negroes are as hideous and bright
clothed as usual; grave Turks with long chibouques continue to
march solemnly without breaking them; a little Arab in one dirty
rag pokes fun at two splendid little Turks with brilliant fezzes;
wiry mountaineers in dirty, full, white kilts, shouldering long
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