| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: waited: she knew that his silence meant neither contempt nor
indifference, only a tyrannous preoccupation. Balthazar was one of
those beings who preserve deep in their souls and after long years all
their youthful delicacy of feeling; he would have thought it criminal
to wound by so much as a word a woman weighed down by the sense of
physical disfigurement. No man knew better than he that a look, a
word, suffices to blot out years of happiness, and is the more cruel
because it contrasts with the unfailing tenderness of the past: our
nature leads us to suffer more from one discord in our happiness than
pleasure coming in the midst of trouble can bring us joy.
Presently Balthazar appeared to waken; he looked quickly about him,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: from his lodgings, he was bowed out; and found himself
reduced, in a very elegant suit of summer tweeds, to herd and
camp with the degraded outcasts of the city.
In this strait, he had recourse to the lawyer who paid him his
allowance.
"Try to remember that my time is valuable, Mr. Carthew," said
the lawyer. "It is quite unnecessary you should enlarge on the
peculiar position in which you stand. Remittance men, as we
call them here, are not so rare in my experience; and in such
cases I act upon a system. I make you a present of a sovereign;
here it is. Every day you choose to call, my clerk will advance
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: to drop him into space, in the same way that sailors drop a body
into the sea; but, as President Barbicane suggested, they must
act quickly, so as to lose as little as possible of that air
whose elasticity would rapidly have spread it into space.
The bolts of the right scuttle, the opening of which measured
about twelve inches across, were carefully drawn, while Michel,
quite grieved, prepared to launch his dog into space. The glass,
raised by a powerful lever, which enabled it to overcome the
pressure of the inside air on the walls of the projectile,
turned rapidly on its hinges, and Satellite was thrown out.
Scarcely a particle of air could have escaped, and the operation
From the Earth to the Moon |
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 Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: And thus Mother Ceres went wandering about for nine long days
and nights, finding no trace of Proserpina, unless it were now
and then a withered flower; and these she picked up and put in
her bosom, because she fancied that they might have fallen from
her poor child's hand. All day she traveled onward through the
hot sun; and, at night again, the flame of the torch would
redden and gleam along the pathway, and she continued her
search by its light, without ever sitting down to rest.
On the tenth day, she chanced to espy the mouth of a cavern
within which (though it was bright noon everywhere else) there
would have been only a dusky twilight; but it so happened that
Tanglewood Tales |
