| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: for the soul. For the immortals, when they are at the end of their course,
go forth and stand upon the outside of heaven, and the revolution of the
spheres carries them round, and they behold the things beyond. But of the
heaven which is above the heavens, what earthly poet ever did or ever will
sing worthily? It is such as I will describe; for I must dare to speak the
truth, when truth is my theme. There abides the very being with which true
knowledge is concerned; the colourless, formless, intangible essence,
visible only to mind, the pilot of the soul. The divine intelligence,
being nurtured upon mind and pure knowledge, and the intelligence of every
soul which is capable of receiving the food proper to it, rejoices at
beholding reality, and once more gazing upon truth, is replenished and made
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov: That bit of my brain which presides over the faculty of
authorship refuses to
work. My memory has grown weak; there is a lack of sequence in
my ideas, and when I put them on paper it always seems to me that
I have lost the instinct for their organic connection; my
construction is monotonous; my language is poor and timid. Often
I write what I do not mean; I have forgotten the beginning when I
am writing the end. Often I forget ordinary words, and I always
have to waste a great deal of energy in avoiding superfluous
phrases and unnecessary parentheses in my letters, both
unmistakable proofs of a decline in mental activity. And it is
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the
hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with
intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary
condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any
property for the immense majority of society.
In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your
property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into
capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being
monopolised, i.e., from the moment when individual property can
no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital,
The Communist Manifesto |
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 Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton: it was bad enough!--to learn that one's sister's husband was a
drug-fiend; it was another, and much worse thing, to learn from
that sister's pallid lips what vileness lay behind the word.
Evelina, unconscious of any distress but her own, sat upright,
shivering in Ann Eliza's hold, while she piled up, detail by
detail, her dreary narrative.
"The minute we got out there, and he found the job wasn't as
good as he expected, he changed. At first I thought he was sick--I
used to try to keep him home and nurse him. Then I saw it was
something different. He used to go off for hours at a time, and
when he came back his eyes kinder had a fog over them. Sometimes
|
