| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad: certain words, gestures, that should in given conditions come
as naturally, as instinctively as the winking of a menaced eye.
A certain order should spring on to his lips without thinking;
a certain sign should get itself made, so to speak,
without reflection. But all unconscious alertness had abandoned me.
I had to make an effort of will to recall myself back
(from the cabin) to the conditions of the moment.
I felt that I was appearing an irresolute commander to those
people who were watching me more or less critically.
And, besides, there were the scares. On the second day out,
for instance, coming off the deck in the afternoon (I had straw
The Secret Sharer |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: to the waggon, and gave her a 'tot' of Cape smoke, and then, as soon as
it was ready, poured about a pint of beef-tea down her throat, made from
the flesh of a blue vilderbeeste I had killed the day before, and after
that she brightened up wonderfully. She could talk Zulu--indeed, it
turned out that she had run away from Zululand in T'Chaka's time--and
she told me that all the people whom I had seen had died of fever. When
they had died the other inhabitants of the kraal had taken the cattle
and gone away, leaving the poor old woman, who was helpless from age and
infirmity, to perish of starvation or disease, as the case might be.
She had been sitting there for three days among the bodies when I found
her. I took her on to the next kraal, and gave the headman a blanket to
Long Odds |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Flame and Shadow by Sara Teasdale: Perhaps if Death is kind, and there can be returning,
We will come back to earth some fragrant night,
And take these lanes to find the sea, and bending
Breathe the same honeysuckle, low and white.
We will come down at night to these resounding beaches
And the long gentle thunder of the sea,
Here for a single hour in the wide starlight
We shall be happy, for the dead are free.
X
Thoughts
When I am all alone
|
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 The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: his fellows.
For a month nothing of moment occurred. Gernois apparently
had no visitors, nor did he on his occasional visits
to the town hold communication with any who might even
by the wildest flight of imagination be construed into secret
agents of a foreign power. Tarzan was beginning to hope that,
after all, the rumor might have been false, when suddenly
Gernois was ordered to Bou Saada in the Petit Sahara far to
the south.
A company of SPAHIS and three officers were to relieve
another company already stationed there. Fortunately one of
The Return of Tarzan |
