| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Heritage of the Desert by Zane Grey: juniper; he rolled on the soft brown mat of earth and hugged it close; he
cooled his hot cheeks in the primrose clusters. He opened his eyes to
new bright green of cedar, to sky of a richer blue, to a desert, strange,
beckoning, enthralling as life itself. He counted backward a month, two
months, and marvelled at the swiftness of time. He counted time forward,
he looked into the future, and all was beautiful--long days, long hunts,
long rides, service to his friend, freedom on the wild steppes,
blue-white dawns upon the eastern crags, red-gold sunsets over the lilac
mountains of the desert. He saw himself in triumphant health and
strength, earning day by day the spirit of this wilderness, coming to
fight for it, to live for it, and in far-off time, when he had won his
The Heritage of the Desert |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Golden Threshold by Sarojini Naidu: neither the body's weakness nor the heart's violence could
disturb that fixed contemplation, as of Buddha on his
lotus-throne.
And along with this wisdom, as of age or of the age of a race,
there was what I can hardly call less than an agony of sensation.
Pain or pleasure transported her, and the whole of pain or
pleasure might be held in a flower's cup or the imagined frown of
a friend. It was never found in those things which to others
seemed things of importance. At the age of twelve she passed the
Matriculation of the Madras University, and awoke to find herself
famous throughout India. "Honestly," she said to me, "I was not
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs: trouble so easily as that.
For a while I kept still. I was utterly squelched.
And to think that I had twice protected her from
attack--the last time risking my life to save hers.
It was incredible that even a daughter of the Stone Age
could be so ungrateful--so heartless; but maybe her heart
partook of the qualities of her epoch.
Presently we found a rift in the cliff which had been widened
and extended by the action of the water draining through it
from the plateau above. It gave us a rather rough climb
to the summit, but finally we stood upon the level mesa
At the Earth's Core |
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 Cratylus by Plato: that we have as yet discussed courage (andreia),--injustice (adikia), which
is obviously nothing more than a hindrance to the penetrating principle
(diaiontos), need not be considered. Well, then, the name of andreia seems
to imply a battle;--this battle is in the world of existence, and according
to the doctrine of flux is only the counterflux (enantia rhon): if you
extract the delta from andreia, the name at once signifies the thing, and
you may clearly understand that andreia is not the stream opposed to every
stream, but only to that which is contrary to justice, for otherwise
courage would not have been praised. The words arren (male) and aner (man)
also contain a similar allusion to the same principle of the upward flux
(te ano rhon). Gune (woman) I suspect to be the same word as goun (birth):
|
