| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber: bunch of violets, with a fleshly tuberose rising from its center.
Her furs were voluminous. Her hat was hidden beneath the cascades
of a green willow plume. A green willow plume would make Edna May
look sophisticated. She walked with that humping hip movement
which city women acquire. She carried a jangling handful of
useless gold trinkets. Her heels were too high, and her hair too
yellow, and her lips too red, and her nose too white, and her
cheeks too pink. Everything about her was "too," from the black
stitching on her white gloves to the buckle of brilliants in her
hat. The city had her, body and soul, and had fashioned her in its
metallic cast. You would have sworn that she had never seen
Buttered Side Down |
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: pupils, lecture to them, watch their relations, and compare them
with people not of their circle.
Mihail Fyodorovitch speaks evil of everything. Katya listens, and
neither of them notices into what depths the apparently innocent
diversion of finding fault with their neighbours is gradually
drawing them. They are not conscious how by degrees simple talk
passes into malicious mockery and jeering, and how they are both
beginning to drop into the habits and methods of slander.
"Killing types one meets with," says Mihail Fyodorovitch. "I went
yesterday to our friend Yegor Petrovitch's, and there I found a
studious gentleman, one of your medicals in his third year, I
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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 Agesilaus by Xenophon: signal for a flight so extraordinary that dead and dying lined the
road, and the living were captured wholesale, nor was a halt made
until the pursuers reached Mount Narthacius. Here, midway between Pras
and Narthacius, Agesilaus erected a trophy, and here for the moment he
halted in unfeigned satisfaction at his exploit, since it was from an
antagonist boasting the finest cavalry in the world that he had
wrested victory with a body of cavalry organised by himself.
[1] I.e. "Xerxes."
[2] I.e. "the Three hundred." See Thuc. v. 72; "Pol. Lac." xiii. 6.
Next day, crossing the mountain barrier of Achaea Phthiotis, his march
lay through friendly territory for the rest of the way as far as the
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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 The Jolly Corner by Henry James: within a twelvemonth fallen in, renovation at a high advance had
proved beautifully possible.
These were items of property indeed, but he had found himself since
his arrival distinguishing more than ever between them. The house
within the street, two bristling blocks westward, was already in
course of reconstruction as a tall mass of flats; he had acceded,
some time before, to overtures for this conversion - in which, now
that it was going forward, it had been not the least of his
astonishments to find himself able, on the spot, and though without
a previous ounce of such experience, to participate with a certain
intelligence, almost with a certain authority. He had lived his
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