| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Main Street by Sinclair Lewis: Kennicott lumbered over to her, patted her shoulder, roared,
"Why, Lord love you, sister, I won't worry if I never get it!
You pay me next fall, when you get your crop. . . .
Carrie! Suppose you or Bea could shake up a cup of coffee
and some cold lamb for the Nelsons? They got a long cold
drive ahead."
III
He had been gone since morning; her eyes ached with reading;
Vida Sherwin could not come to tea. She wandered
through the house, empty as the bleary street without. The
problem of "Will the doctor be home in time for supper, or
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: to any size, none had yet begun to shoot skyward with that whip-
like shaft of the mature palm. In the young trees the colour
alters with the age and growth. Now all is of a grass-like hue,
infinitely dainty; next the rib grows golden, the fronds remaining
green as ferns; and then, as the trunk continues to mount and to
assume its final hue of grey, the fans put on manlier and more
decided depths of verdure, stand out dark upon the distance,
glisten against the sun, and flash like silver fountains in the
assault of the wind. In this young wood of Taahauku, all these
hues and combinations were exampled and repeated by the score. The
trees grew pleasantly spaced upon a hilly sward, here and there
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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 A treatise on Good Works by Dr. Martin Luther: self-confidence contrary to these two first Commandments.
Now the world regards this terrible vice as the highest virtue,
and this makes it exceedingly dangerous for those who do not
understand and have not had experience of God's Commandments and
the histories of the Holy Scriptures, to read or hear the heathen
books and histories. For all heathen books are poisoned through
and through with this striving after praise and honor; in them
men are taught by blind reason that they were not nor could be
men of power and worth, who are not moved by praise and honor;
but those are counted the best, who disregard body and life,
friend and property and everything in the effort to win praise
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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 A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: who, in his transient existence as a poet, commented upon the
smell of the rose. He will comfort you. You came to me stripped
of all prestige by men's queer smiles and the disrespectful
chatter of every vagrant trader in the Islands. Your name was
the common property of the winds; it, as it were, floated naked
over the waters about the equator. I wrapped round its
unhonoured form the royal mantle of the tropics, and have essayed
to put into the hollow sound the very anguish of paternity--feats
which you did not demand from me--but remember that all the toil
and all the pain were mine. In your earthly life you haunted me,
Almayer. Consider that this was taking a great liberty. Since
A Personal Record |
