| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Blix by Frank Norris: suddenly silent, and for a long time the two sat there without
speaking, absorbed in the enjoyment of looking at the enormous
green hills rolling down to the sea, the breakers thundering at
the beach, the gashed pinnacles of rock, the vast reach of the
Pacific, and the distant prospect of the old fort at the entrance
of the Golden Gate.
"We might be a thousand miles away from the city, for all the
looks of it, mightn't we, Condy?" said Blix, after a while. "And
I'm that HUNGRY! It must be nearly noon."
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all round. But he had still
another reason for his want of faith. It was this, if I remember
right: Jonah was swallowed by the whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and
after three days he was vomited up somewhere within three days'
journey of Nineveh, a city on the Tigris, very much more than three
days' journey across from the nearest point of the Mediterranean
coast. How is that?
But was there no other way for the whale to land the prophet within
that short distance of Nineveh? Yes. He might have carried him
round by the way of the Cape of Good Hope. But not to speak of the
passage through the whole length of the Mediterranean, and another
Moby Dick |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: aunt that made the difference; to which she replied: "She never
knew I knew you. I wished her not to." The beautiful clearness of
her candour - her faded beauty was like a summer twilight -
disconnected the words from any image of deceit. They might have
struck him as the record of a deep dissimulation; but she had
always given him a sense of noble reasons. The vanished aunt was
present, as he looked about him, in the small complacencies of the
room, the beaded velvet and the fluted moreen; and though, as we
know, he had the worship of the Dead, he found himself not
definitely regretting this lady. If she wasn't in his long list,
however, she was in her niece's short one, and Stransom presently
|
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 Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: been scattered abroad as colonies of captives.
Then another, and a seemingly needful link of cause and effect
ensued: Alexander of Macedon destroyed the Persian Empire, and the
East became Greek, and Alexandria, rather than Jerusalem, became the
head-quarters of Jewish learning. But for that very cause, the
Scriptures were not left inaccessible to the mass of mankind, like
the old Pehlevi liturgies of the Zend-avesta, or the old Sanscrit
Vedas, in an obsolete and hieratic tongue, but were translated into,
and continued in, the then all but world-wide Hellenic speech, which
was to the ancient world what French is to the modern.
Then the East became Roman, without losing its Greek speech. And
|
