| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain Ahab
should be tranquilly laid out--which might hardly come to pass, so he
muttered--then, whoever should do that last office for the dead,
would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.
So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the
livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I
hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing
to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. It had
previously come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned
from the polished bone of the sperm whale's jaw. "Aye, he was
dismasted off Japan," said the old Gay-Head Indian once; "but like
 Moby Dick |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: spoke with force, for what reason she did not yet feel certain.
"Absolute sincerity is rather difficult, don't you think?" she
inquired, with a touch of irony.
"There are people one credits even with that," he replied a little
vaguely. He was ashamed of his savage wish to hurt her, and yet it was
not for the sake of hurting her, who was beyond his shafts, but in
order to mortify his own incredibly reckless impulse of abandonment to
the spirit which seemed, at moments, about to rush him to the
uttermost ends of the earth. She affected him beyond the scope of his
wildest dreams. He seemed to see that beneath the quiet surface of her
manner, which was almost pathetically at hand and within reach for all
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