| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson: filled me with shame for Catriona and concern for myself.
The following day, Prestongrange and I, with a considerable company,
set out for Glasgow, where (to my impatience) we continued to linger
some time in a mixture of pleasure and affairs. I lodged with my lord,
with whom I was encouraged to familiarity; had my place at
entertainments; was presented to the chief guests; and altogether made
more of than I thought accorded either with my parts or station; so
that, on strangers being present, I would often blush for
Prestongrange. It must be owned the view I had taken of the world in
these last months was fit to cast a gloom upon my character. I had met
many men, some of them leaders in Israel whether by their birth or
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it.
While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms
that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me,
and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people
of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and
simplified now, like the image of the plough against the sun.
They were all I had for an answer to the new appeal.
I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took
up in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things.
But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early
friends were quickened within it, and in some strange
My Antonia |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: the ship-wrights; and the like of other arts which they think capable of
being taught and learned. And if some person offers to give them advice
who is not supposed by them to have any skill in the art, even though he be
good-looking, and rich, and noble, they will not listen to him, but laugh
and hoot at him, until either he is clamoured down and retires of himself;
or if he persist, he is dragged away or put out by the constables at the
command of the prytanes. This is their way of behaving about professors of
the arts. But when the question is an affair of state, then everybody is
free to have a say--carpenter, tinker, cobbler, sailor, passenger; rich and
poor, high and low--any one who likes gets up, and no one reproaches him,
as in the former case, with not having learned, and having no teacher, and
|
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 Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell: baby. She's beginning to slobber and I can't get to my
handkerchief. She's a fine baby, I'm sure, but she's wetting my
shirt bosom."
She took the child back into her lap and Rhett settled himself
lazily on the banister and took a cigar from a silver case.
"You are always going to New Orleans," she said and pouted a
little. "And you never will tell me what you do there."
"I am a hard-working man, Scarlett, and perhaps my business takes
me there."
"Hard-working! You!" she laughed impertinently. "You never worked
in your life. You're too lazy. All you ever do is finance
Gone With the Wind |
