| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman by Thomas Hardy: time without any fire. The marked civility of Clare's
tone in calling her seemed to have inspired her, for
the moment, with a new glimmer of hope. But it soon
died when she looked at him.
The pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former
fires. To the hot sorrow of the previous night had
succeeded heaviness; it seemed as if nothing could
kindle either of them to fervour of sensation any more.
He spoke gently to her, and she replied with a like
undemonstrativeness. At last she came up to him,
looking in his sharply-defined face as one who had no
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart: unkempt as the one Alex had captured. The man knew the
detective, and he gave him a piece of dirty paper, on which was
scrawled the words--"He's at City Hospital, Johnsville." The
tramp who brought the paper pretended to know nothing, except
this: the paper had been passed along from a "hobo" in
Johnsville, who seemed to know the information would be valuable
to us.
Again the long distance telephone came into requisition. Mr.
Jamieson called the hospital, while we crowded around him. And
when there was no longer any doubt that it was Halsey, and that
he would probably recover, we all laughed and cried together. I
The Circular Staircase |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde: fact is, we all scramble and jostle so much nowadays that I wonder we
have anything at all left on us at the end of an evening. I know
myself that, when I am coming back from the Drawing Room, I always
feel as if I hadn't a shred on me, except a small shred of decent
reputation, just enough to prevent the lower classes making painful
observations through the windows of the carriage. The fact is that
our Society is terribly over-populated. Really, some one should
arrange a proper scheme of assisted emigration. It would do a great
deal of good.
MRS. CHEVELEY. I quite agree with you, Lady Markby. It is nearly
six years since I have been in London for the Season, and I must say
|
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 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: a city, through which run the Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin,
where a thousand lanes cross, and of which the insurgents had made
their redoubt and their stronghold, would have appeared to him like
a dark and enormous cavity hollowed out in the centre of Paris.
There the glance fell into an abyss. Thanks to the broken lanterns,
thanks to the closed windows, there all radiance, all life,
all sound, all movement ceased. The invisible police of the
insurrection were on the watch everywhere, and maintained order,
that is to say, night. The necessary tactics of insurrection
are to drown small numbers in a vast obscurity, to multiply every
combatant by the possibilities which that obscurity contains.
Les Miserables |
