| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: "Yes. Wait a bit... I... saw him," Sonya could not help saying,
not yet knowing whom Natasha meant by him, Nicholas or Prince Andrew.
"But why shouldn't I say I saw something? Others do see! Besides who
can tell whether I saw anything or not?" flashed through Sonya's mind.
"Yes, I saw him," she said.
"How? Standing or lying?"
"No, I saw... At first there was nothing, then I saw him lying
down."
"Andrew lying? Is he ill?" asked Natasha, her frightened eyes
fixed on her friend.
"No, on the contrary, on the contrary! His face was cheerful, and he
War and Peace |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, etc. by Oscar Wilde: familiar to all real students of Shakespeare.
One point puzzled me immensely as I read the Sonnets, and it was
days before I struck on the true interpretation, which indeed Cyril
Graham himself seems to have missed. I could not understand how it
was that Shakespeare set so high a value on his young friend
marrying. He himself had married young, and the result had been
unhappiness, and it was not likely that he would have asked Willie
Hughes to commit the same error. The boy-player of Rosalind had
nothing to gain from marriage, or from the passions of real life.
The early sonnets, with their strange entreaties to have children,
seemed to me a jarring note. The explanation of the mystery came
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