| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: superstitions.
It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night
of the seventh or eighth day after the placing of the lady
Madeline within the donjon, that I experienced the full power of
such feelings. Sleep came not near my couch--while the hours
waned and waned away. I struggled to reason off the nervousness
which had dominion over me. I endeavoured to believe that much,
if not all of what I felt, was due to the bewildering influence
of the gloomy furniture of the room--of the dark and tattered
draperies, which, tortured into motion by the breath of a rising
tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and rustled
The Fall of the House of Usher |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Jungle by Upton Sinclair: was no place for the little fellow to wait, save in the doorways or in
a corner of the killing beds, and he would all but fall asleep there,
and freeze to death.
There was no heat upon the killing beds; the men might exactly as well
have worked out of doors all winter. For that matter, there was very
little heat anywhere in the building, except in the cooking rooms and
such places--and it was the men who worked in these who ran the most
risk of all, because whenever they had to pass to another room they
had to go through ice-cold corridors, and sometimes with nothing on
above the waist except a sleeveless undershirt. On the killing beds
you were apt to be covered with blood, and it would freeze solid; if you
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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 The Passionate Pilgrim by William Shakespeare: A flower that dies when first it gins to bud;
A brittle glass that's broken presently:
A doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower,
Lost, vaded, broken, dead within an hour.
And as goods lost are seld or never found,
As vaded gloss no rubbing will refresh,
As flowers dead lie wither'd on the ground,
As broken glass no cement can redress,
So beauty blemish'd once's for ever lost,
In spite of physic, painting, pain and cost.
XIV.
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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 Animal Farm by George Orwell: cold, and in summer by the flies. Sometimes the older ones among them
racked their dim memories and tried to determine whether in the early
days of the Rebellion, when Jones's expulsion was still recent, things had
been better or worse than now. They could not remember. There was nothing
with which they could compare their present lives: they had nothing to go
upon except Squealer's lists of figures, which invariably demonstrated
that everything was getting better and better. The animals found the
problem insoluble; in any case, they had little time for speculating on
such things now. Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of
his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be
much better or much worse--hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so
Animal Farm |
