| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from One Basket by Edna Ferber: They fled, terrified. The door banged behind them.
Jo stood, shaking, in the center of the room. Then he reached
for a chair, gropingly, and sat down. He passed one moist,
flabby hand over his forehead and it came away wet. The
telephone rang. He sat still. It sounded far away and
unimportant, like something forgotten. But it rang and rang
insistently. Jo liked to answer his telephone when he was at
home.
"Hello!" He knew instantly the voice at the other end.
"That you, Jo?" it said.
"Yes."
One Basket |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Emma McChesney & Co. by Edna Ferber: strange things about barley-water and formulae and units and
olive oil, and orange juice and ounces and farina, and
bath-thermometers and blue-and-white striped nurses who view
grandmothers with a coldly disapproving and pitying eye.
She watched the bathing-process for the first time with wonder as
frank as it was unfeigned.
"And I thought I was a modern woman!" she marveled. "When I
used to bathe Jock I tested the temperature of the water with my
elbow; and I know my mother used to test my bath-water when I was
a baby by putting me into it. She used to say that if I turned
blue she knew the water was too cold, and if I turned red she
Emma McChesney & Co. |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Rig Veda: arms, a
son.
He went, as lover to a dame, to take his station suitor-like.
15 That Hero who produces strength, he who hath propped both
worlds
apart,
Gold-hued, hath wrapped him in the sieve, to settle, priest-like,
in
his place.
16 Soma upon the ox's skin through the sheep's wool flows purified.
Bellowing out, the Tawny Steer goes on to Indra's special place.
The Rig Veda |
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 Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: her position as a lady. This is her task.
"For in our day a woman repudiated by her husband, reduced to a meagre
allowance, with no carriage, no luxury, no opera-box, none of the
divine accessories of the toilet, is no longer a wife, a maid, or a
townswoman; she is adrift, and becomes a chattel. The Carmelites will
not receive a married woman; it would be bigamy. Would her lover still
have anything to say to her? That is the question. Thus your perfect
lady may perhaps give occasion to calumny, never to slander."
"It is all so horribly true," said the Princesse de Cadignan.
"And so," said Blondet, "our 'perfect lady' lives between English
hypocrisy and the delightful frankness of the eighteenth century--a
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