| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Master of the World by Jules Verne: forests, even as far as Pleasant Garden and Morganton?
This time the panic was overwhelming; nothing could stop it. Women
carrying their infants, crazed with terror, rushed along the eastward
roads. Men, deserting their homes, made hurried bundles of their most
precious belongings and set free their livestock, cows, sheep, pigs,
which fled in all directions. What disorder resulted from this
agglomeration, human and animal, under darkest night, amid forests,
threatened by the fires of the volcano, along the border of marshes
whose waters might be upheaved and overflow! With the earth itself
threatening to disappear from under the feet of the fugitives! Would
they be in time to save themselves, if a cascade of glowing lava came
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: PROTARCHUS: Do you mean, when a person says that I, Protarchus, am by
nature one and also many, dividing the single 'me' into many 'me's,' and
even opposing them as great and small, light and heavy, and in ten thousand
other ways?
SOCRATES: Those, Protarchus, are the common and acknowledged paradoxes
about the one and many, which I may say that everybody has by this time
agreed to dismiss as childish and obvious and detrimental to the true
course of thought; and no more favour is shown to that other puzzle, in
which a person proves the members and parts of anything to be divided, and
then confessing that they are all one, says laughingly in disproof of his
own words: Why, here is a miracle, the one is many and infinite, and the
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: sound. The cases and numbers of nouns, the persons, tenses, numbers of
verbs, were generally on the same or nearly the same pattern and had the
same meaning. The sounds by which they were expressed were rough-hewn at
first; after a while they grew more refined--the natural laws of euphony
began to affect them. The rules of syntax are likewise based upon analogy.
Time has an analogy with space, arithmetic with geometry. Not only in
musical notes, but in the quantity, quality, accent, rhythm of human
speech, trivial or serious, there is a law of proportion. As in things of
beauty, as in all nature, in the composition as well as in the motion of
all things, there is a similarity of relations by which they are held
together.
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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 Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber: she inquired, coolly. "It's a perfectly good neck, ain't it?"
Louie, his face very red, took the plunge. "I don't know. I
guess so. But, Sophy, it--looks so--so--you know what I mean. I
hate to see the way the fellows rubber at you. Why don't you wear
those plain shirtwaist things, with high collars, like my mother
wears back home?"
Sophy's teeth came together with a click. She laughed a short
cruel little laugh. "Say, Pink Cheeks, did yuh ever do a washin'
from seven to twelve, after you got home from work in the evenin'?
It's great! 'Specially when you're living in a six-by-ten room
with all the modern inconveniences, includin' no water except on
Buttered Side Down |
