| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: sleeves of his coats were soon in holes.
To this slight picture of the outer man I must add a sketch of his
moral qualities, for I believe I can now judge him impartially.
Though naturally religious, Louis did not accept the minute practices
of the Roman ritual; his ideas were more intimately in sympathy with
Saint Theresa and Fenelon, and several Fathers and certain Saints,
who, in our day, would be regarded as heresiarchs or atheists. He was
rigidly calm during the services. His own prayers went up in gusts, in
aspirations, without any regular formality; in all things he gave
himself up to nature, and would not pray, any more than he would
think, at any fixed hour. In chapel he was equally apt to think of God
Louis Lambert |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the
existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois
society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.
And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one
hand inforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the
other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough
exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way
for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by
diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the
ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
The Communist Manifesto |
