| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy: abandonment of the world, and hastened to finish it in order to
send for the merchant with the sick daughter. She interested him
in that she presented a distraction, and because both she and her
father considered him a saint whose prayers were efficacious.
Outwardly he disavowed that idea, but in the depths of his soul
he considered it to be true.
He was often amazed that this had happened, that he, Stepan
Kasatsky, had come to be such an extraordinary saint and even a
worker of miracles, but of the fact that he was such there could
not be the least doubt. He could not fail to believe in the
miracles he himself witnessed, beginning with the sick boy and
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all?
Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage--who can tell?--
but truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool
gape and shudder--the man knows, and can look on without a wink.
But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore.
He must meet that truth with his own true stuff--
with his own inborn strength. Principles won't do.
Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags--rags that would fly off
at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief.
An appeal to me in this fiendish row--is there? Very well;
I hear; I admit, but I have a voice, too, and for good or evil
Heart of Darkness |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac: handiwork, jerked his head, and went.
The anxious sinecure-holder did not share his retainer's favorable
opinion. Before seating himself in his deep chair, whose rounded back
screened him from draughts, he looked round him doubtfully, examined
his dressing-gown with a hostile expression, shook off a few grains of
snuff, carefully wiped his nose, arranged the tongs and shovel, made
the fire, pulled up the heels of his slippers, pulled out his little
queue of hair which had lodged horizontally between the collar of his
waistcoat and that of his dressing-gown restoring it to its
perpendicular position; then he swept up the ashes of the hearth,
which bore witness to a persistent catarrh. Finally, the old man did
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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 Burning Daylight by Jack London: It was hard on the stupid lowly, for they were coppered to lose
from the start; but the more he saw of the others, the apparent
winners, the less it seemed to him that they had anything to brag
about. They, too, were a long time dead, and their living did
not amount to much. It was a wild animal fight; the strong
trampled the weak, and the strong, he had already
discovered,--men
like Dowsett, and Letton, and Guggenhammer,--were not necessarily
the best. He remembered his miner comrades of the Arctic. They
were the stupid lowly, they did the hard work and were robbed of
the fruit of their toil just as was the old woman making wine in
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