| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Moon-Face and Other Stories by Jack London: His resolution was ebbing. He would not speak--she knew it; and she knew,
likewise, with the sureness of faith, that it was because he could not.
She gazed despairingly before her, a numb feeling at her heart, as though hope
and happiness had died. She watched the sun flickering down through the
warm-trunked redwoods. But she watched in a mechanical, absent way. She looked
at the scene as from a long way off, without interest, herself an alien, no
longer an intimate part of the earth and trees and flowers she loved so well.
So far removed did she seem, that she was aware of a curiosity, strangely
impersonal, in what lay around her. Through a near vista she looked at a
buckeye tree in full blossom as though her eyes encountered it for the first
time. Her eyes paused and dwelt upon a yellow cluster of Diogenes' lanterns
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Hermione's Little Group of Serious Thinkers by Don Marquis: tories, from Main to Oregon, are thus rebuking
Class Prejudice and Bourgeois Smugness. Like
Poets, like Prophets of the New Art, they stand,
Glue Factory after Glue Factory, expressing their
Egos, Being Themselves, undaunted, unshackled,
strong, independent, virile! Oh, to be the Poet of
the Super Glue Factory!
With violets in my hands I wandered to the
wilds, and there I met a Buzzard. He was Being
Himself! I wove a wreath of the violets and I
crowned the Buzzard, and the Buzzard said, "Why
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and
morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find
pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless
activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy
crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is
a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or
physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with
joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than
disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a
machine.
And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present, man has
|
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 A Drama on the Seashore by Honore de Balzac: pure sentiments blend together, what is that but two sweet voices
singing? To be able to appreciate properly the emotion that held us,
it would be necessary to share the state of half sensuous delight into
which the events of the morning had plunged us. Admire for a long time
some pretty dove with iridescent colors, perched on a swaying branch
above a spring, and you will give a cry of pain when you see a hawk
swooping down upon her, driving its steel claws into her breast, and
bearing her away with murderous rapidity. When we had advanced a step
or two into an open space which lay before what seemed to be a grotto,
a sort of esplanade placed a hundred feet above the ocean, and
protected from its fury by buttresses of rock, we suddenly experienced
|
