| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald: it's hard to be made a cynic at twenty."
"I was born one," Amory murmured. "I'm a cynical idealist." He
paused and wondered if that meant anything.
They reached the sleeping school of Lawrenceville, and turned to
ride back.
"It's good, this ride, isn't it?" Tom said presently.
"Yes; it's a good finish, it's knock-out; everything's good
to-night. Oh, for a hot, languorous summer and Isabelle!"
"Oh, you and your Isabelle! I'll bet she's a simple one ... let's
say some poetry."
So Amory declaimed "The Ode to a Nightingale" to the bushes they
This Side of Paradise |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Chronicles of the Canongate by Walter Scott: called, on whose estate he had provided her an asylum. In truth,
however, nothing could be farther from her thoughts. From what
he had said during their first violent dispute, Elspat had
gathered that, if Hamish returned not by the appointed time
permitted by his furlough, he would incur the hazard of corporal
punishment. Were he placed within the risk of being thus
dishonoured, she was well aware that he would never submit to the
disgrace by a return to the regiment where it might be inflicted.
Whether she looked to any farther probable consequences of her
unhappy scheme cannot be known; but the partner of MacTavish
Mhor, in all his perils and wanderings, was familiar with an
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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 In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: or permanent marquee - called here a maniapa, or, as the word is
now pronounced, a maniap' - at the lowest estimation forty feet by
sixty. The iron roof, lofty but exceedingly low-browed, so that a
woman must stoop to enter, is supported externally on pillars of
coral, within by a frame of wood. The floor is of broken coral,
divided in aisles by the uprights of the frame; the house far
enough from shore to catch the breeze, which enters freely and
disperses the mosquitoes; and under the low eaves the sun is seen
to glitter and the waves to dance on the lagoon.
It was now some while since we had met any but slumberers; and when
we had wandered down the pier and stumbled at last into this bright
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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 War and the Future by H. G. Wells: sweating men, the calculated efficiency of each worker, the
apparent heedlessness, the real certitude, with which the blazing
hot cylinder is put here, dropped there, rolls to its next
appointed spot, is chopped up and handed on, the swift passage to
the cooling crude, pinkish-purple shell shape. Down a long line
one sees in perspective a practical symmetry, of furnace and
machine group and the shells marching on from this first series
of phases to undergo the long succession of operations, machine
after machine, across the great width of the shed in which eighty
per cent of the workers are women. There is a thick dust of
sounds in the air, a rumble of shafting, sudden thuddings,
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