| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and
peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to
say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the
idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted
river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their
huge bake-houses the pyramids.
No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast,
plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head.
True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to
spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of
thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honour,
Moby Dick |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau by Honore de Balzac: which he enjoyed. The government, wishing on the one hand to cheapen
Napoleon's order by lavishing the cross of the Legion of honor, and on
the other to win adherents and rally to the Bourbons the various
trades and men of arts and sciences, included Birotteau in the coming
promotion. This honor, which suited well with the show that Cesar made
in his arrondissement, put him in a position where the ideas of a man
accustomed to succeed naturally enlarged themselves. The news which
the mayor had just given him of his preferment was the determining
reason that decided him to plunge into the scheme which he now for the
first time revealed to his wife; he believed it would enable him to
give up perfumery all the more quickly, and rise into the regions of
Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau |
