| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Second Home by Honore de Balzac: their always miry alley; for how could it be clean? When the summer
sun shed its perpendicular rays on Paris like a sheet of gold, but as
piercing as the point of a sword, it lighted up the blackness of this
street for a few minutes without drying the permanent damp that rose
from the ground-floor to the first story of these dark and silent
tenements.
The residents, who lighted their lamps at five o'clock in the month of
June, in winter never put them out. To this day the enterprising
wayfarer who should approach the Marais along the quays, past the end
of the Rue du Chaume, the Rues de l'Homme Arme, des Billettes, and des
Deux-Portes, all leading to the Rue du Tourniquet, might think he had
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell: hoarsely, babbling as though to a grave which would never give up
its secrets, babbling the truth for the first time in his life,
baring himself mercilessly to Melanie who was at first, utterly
uncomprehending, utterly maternal. He talked brokenly, burrowing
his head in her lap, tugging at the folds of her skirt. Sometimes
his words were blurred, muffled, sometimes they came far too
clearly to her ears, harsh, bitter words of confession and
abasement, speaking of things she had never heard even a woman
mention, secret things that brought the hot blood of modesty to her
cheeks and made her grateful for his bowed head.
She patted his head as she did little Beau's and said: "Hush!
Gone With the Wind |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked for. To
hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing
north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and
compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting, who can
annoy himself about the future?
I came out at length above the Allier. A more unsightly prospect
at this season of the year it would be hard to fancy. Shelving
hills rose round it on all sides, here dabbled with wood and
fields, there rising to peaks alternately naked and hairy with
pines. The colour throughout was black or ashen, and came to a
point in the ruins of the castle of Luc, which pricked up
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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 A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: some of us! . . . Claudine never wearies; you can always count upon
her. It is not love, I tell her, it is infatuation. She writes to me
every day; I do not read her letters; she found that out, but still
she writes. See here; there are two hundred letters in this casket.
She begs me to wipe my razors on one of her letters every day, and I
punctually do so. She thinks, and rightly, that the sight of her
handwriting will put me in mind of her.'
"La Palferine was dressing as he told us this. I took up the letter
which he was about to put to this use, read it, and kept it, as he did
not ask to have it back. Here it is. I looked for it, and found it as
I promised.
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