| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: five years' taxes on all the neighboring cottages if the owners would
have their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps their refusal took the
heart out of his plan to Found a Family--he went into an immediate
decline. His children sold his house with the black wreath still on the
door. Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always
been obstinate about being peasantry.
After half an hour, the sun shone again, and the grocer's automobile
rounded Gatsby's drive with the raw material for his servants' dinner--I
felt sure he wouldn't eat a spoonful. A maid began opening the upper
windows of his house, appeared momentarily in each, and, leaning from a
large central bay, spat meditatively into the garden. It was time I
The Great Gatsby |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac: of the good times of my youth, when adventures were not lacking, any
more than duels. We were gay dogs then! Nowadays you think and worry
over everything, as though there had never been a fifteenth and a
sixteenth century."
"But, monsieur, are we not in the right? The sixteenth century only
gave religious liberty to Europe, and the nineteenth will give it
political lib----"
"Oh, we will not talk politics. I am a perfect old woman--ultra you
see. But I do not hinder young men from being revolutionary, so long
as they leave the King at liberty to disperse their assemblies."
When they had gone a little way, and the Count and his companion were
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