| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Extracts From Adam's Diary by Mark Twain: Tuesday
She has littered the whole estate with execrable names and offensive
signs:
THIS WAY TO THE WHIRLPOOL.
THIS WAY TO GOAT ISLAND.
CAVE OF THE WINDS THIS WAY.
She says this park would make a tidy summer resort, if there was
any custom for it. Summer resort--another invention of hers--just
words, without any meaning. What is a summer resort? But it is
best not to ask her, she has such a rage for explaining.
Friday
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: Indians about, - iron stars, each ray a rusty thorn an inch and a
half long, - stick through moccasins into feet, - cripple 'em on
the spot, and give 'em lockjaw in a day or two.
At the same time he let off one of those big words which lie at the
bottom of the best man's vocabulary, but perhaps never turn up in
his life, - just as every man's hair MAY stand on end, but in most
men it never does.
After he had got calm, he pulled out a sheet or two of manuscript,
together with a smaller scrap, on which, as he said, he had just
been writing an introduction or prelude to the main performance. A
certain suspicion had come into my mind that the Professor was not
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Recruit by Honore de Balzac: or shocking that of her own friends.
Then about thirty-eight years of age, she still preserved, not the
fresh plump beauty which distinguishes the daughters of Lower
Normandy, but a fragile and, so to speak, aristocratic beauty. Her
features were delicate and refined, her figure supple and easy. When
she spoke, her pale face lighted and seemed to acquire fresh life. Her
large dark eyes were full of affability and kindness, and yet their
calm, religious expression seemed to say that the springs of her
existence were no longer in her.
Married in the flower of her age to an old and jealous soldier, the
falseness of her position in the midst of a court noted for its
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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 Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: round them. Now he would attempt again to tell her his faults,
and why he loved her; and she would describe what she had felt at this
time or at that time, and together they would interpret her feeling.
So beautiful was the sound of their voices that by degrees they
scarcely listened to the words they framed. Long silences came between
their words, which were no longer silences of struggle and confusion
but refreshing silences, in which trivial thoughts moved easily.
They began to speak naturally of ordinary things, of the flowers
and the trees, how they grew there so red, like garden flowers
at home, and there bent and crooked like the arm of a twisted old man.
Very gently and quietly, almost as if it were the blood singing
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