| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: horning each other. Clearly, the affair had to be stopped.
We all stood by and watched admiringly while Fuchs rode into
the corral with a pitchfork and prodded the bulls again and again,
finally driving them apart.
The big storm of the winter began on my eleventh birthday, the twentieth
of January. When I went down to breakfast that morning, Jake and Otto
came in white as snow-men, beating their hands and stamping their feet.
They began to laugh boisterously when they saw me, calling:
`You've got a birthday present this time, Jim, and no mistake.
They was a full-grown blizzard ordered for you.'
All day the storm went on. The snow did not fall this time, it simply
My Antonia |
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 Adieu by Honore de Balzac: the ease of a bird. She gathered an apple and ate it; then she dropped
to the ground with the graceful ease we admire in a squirrel. Her
limbs possessed an elasticity which took from every movement the
slightest appearance of effort or constraint. She played upon the
turf, rolling herself about like a child; then, suddenly, she flung
her feet and hands forward, and lay at full length on the grass, with
the grace and natural ease of a young cat asleep in the sun. Thunder
sounded in the distance, and she turned suddenly, rising on her hands
and knees with the rapidity of a dog which hears a coming footstep.
The effects of this singular attitude was to separate into two heavy
masses the volume of her black hair, which now fell on either side of
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