| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield: eyes, red lips, a slow sleepy smile, a fine tennis player, a perfect
dancer, and with it all a mystery. Harry Kember was like a man walking in
his sleep. Men couldn't stand him, they couldn't get a word out of the
chap; he ignored his wife just as she ignored him. How did he live? Of
course there were stories, but such stories! They simply couldn't be told.
The women he'd been seen with, the places he'd been seen in...but nothing
was ever certain, nothing definite. Some of the women at the Bay privately
thought he'd commit a murder one day. Yes, even while they talked to Mrs.
Kember and took in the awful concoction she was wearing, they saw her,
stretched as she lay on the beach; but cold, bloody, and still with a
cigarette stuck in the corner of her mouth.
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Georgics by Virgil: In months that are not summer's; twice teem the flocks;
Twice doth the tree yield service of her fruit.
But ravening tigers come not nigh, nor breed
Of savage lion, nor aconite betrays
Its hapless gatherers, nor with sweep so vast
Doth the scaled serpent trail his endless coils
Along the ground, or wreathe him into spires.
Mark too her cities, so many and so proud,
Of mighty toil the achievement, town on town
Up rugged precipices heaved and reared,
And rivers undergliding ancient walls.
Georgics |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: set up for themselves upon the new land. And then a bird or two,
caught in a storm and blown away to sea finds shelter in the
cocoa-grove; and so a little new world is set up, in which (you
must remember always) there are no four-footed beasts, nor snakes,
nor lizards, nor frogs, nor any animals that cannot cross the sea.
And on some of those islands they may live (indeed there is reason
to believe they have lived), so long, that some of them have
changed their forms, according to the laws of Madam How, who
sooner or later fits each thing exactly for the place in which it
is meant to live, till upon some of them you may find such strange
and unique creatures as the famous cocoa-nut crab, which learned
|
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 Ebb-Tide by Stevenson & Osbourne: in the doorway a plump and pretty young woman with a clean
towel.
'Hullo!' cried Herrick, who now saw for the first time the
fourth survivor of the pestilence, and was startled by the
recollection of the captain's orders.
'Yes,' said Attwater, 'the whole colony lives about the house,
what's left of it. We are all afraid of devils, if you please!
and Taniera and she sleep in the front parlour, and the other boy
on the verandah.'
'She is pretty,' said Herrick.
'Too pretty,' said Attwater. 'That was why I had her married.
|
