| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: are wasting your affections on her when they might be much better
employed elsewhere. I could have told you of half a score of
women in the financial world, any one of them a thousand times
better worth your while than that titled courtesan, who does with
her brains what less artificial women do with----"
"What is this, my dear fellow?" Armand broke in. "The Duchess
is an angel of innocence."
Ronquerolles began to laugh.
"Things being thus, dear boy," said he, "it is my duty to
enlighten you. Just a word; there is no harm in it between
ourselves. Has the Duchess surrendered? If so, I have nothing
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: has long ago prepared what he has to say, although he who is praised may
not have been good for much. The speakers praise him for what he has done
and for what he has not done--that is the beauty of them--and they steal
away our souls with their embellished words; in every conceivable form they
praise the city; and they praise those who died in war, and all our
ancestors who went before us; and they praise ourselves also who are still
alive, until I feel quite elevated by their laudations, and I stand
listening to their words, Menexenus, and become enchanted by them, and all
in a moment I imagine myself to have become a greater and nobler and finer
man than I was before. And if, as often happens, there are any foreigners
who accompany me to the speech, I become suddenly conscious of having a
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: there's something sort of haunted about it. The boy is not
strong, for one thing. I happen to know that he was born in
Colorado, only a few months before his mother died out there of a
long illness. There is something wrong about the fellow."
The drawing master had come to realize that, in looking at
Paul, one saw only his white teeth and the forced animation of
his eyes. One warm afternoon the boy had gone to sleep at his
drawing board, and his master had noted with amazement what a
white, blue-veined face it was; drawn and wrinkled like an old
man's about the eyes, the lips twitching even in his sleep, and
stiff with a nervous tension that drew them back from his teeth.
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
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 Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: dim retreat where, perchance, a pallid suffering man whispers a single
word into his ear; that word, like a torch lighted in a mine, reveals
to him a Science. All human ideas, arrayed in every attractive form
which Mystery can invent surrounded a blind man seated in a wayside
ditch. Three worlds, the Natural, the Spiritual, the Divine, with all
their spheres, opened their portals to a Florentine exile; he walked
attended by the Happy and the Unhappy; by those who prayed and those
who moaned; by angels and by souls in hell. When the Sent of God, who
knew and could accomplish all things, appeared to three of his
disciples it was at eventide, at the common table of the humblest of
inns; and then and there the Light broke forth, shattering Material
Seraphita |
