| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: roll.
After trying to get a few reasonable ideas into this foolish head,
Rabourdin had finally given up the attempt as hopeless. Adolphe (his
family name was Adolphe) had lately economized on dinners and lived
entirely on bread and water, to buy a pair of spurs and a riding-whip.
Jokes at the expense of this starving Amadis were made only in the
spirit of mischievous fun which creates vaudevilles, for he was really
a kind-hearted fellow and a good comrade, who harmed no one but
himself. A standing joke in the two bureaus was the question whether
he wore corsets, and bets depended on it. Vimeux was originally
appointed to Baudoyer's bureau, but he manoeuvred to get himself
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: unbelievers. The society, once so homogeneous and co-ordinated in all its
parts, would become at once a society rent by moral and social problems;
and endless suffering must arise to individuals in the attempt to co-
ordinate the ideals, manners, and institutions of the society to the new
conditions! There might be immense gain in many directions; lives
otherwise sacrificed would be spared, a higher and more satisfactory stage
of existence might be entered on; but the disco-ordination and struggle
would be inevitable until the society had established an equilibrium
between its knowledge, its material conditions, and its social, sexual, and
religious ideals and institutions.
An analogous condition, but of a far more complex kind, exists at the
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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 Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling: the little white shirt, and the fat little body used to rise from
the shade of the creeper-covered trellis where they had been hid;
and daily I checked my horse here, that my salutation might not be
slurred over or given unseemly.
Muhammad Din never had any companions. He used to trot about the
compound, in and out of the castor-oil bushes, on mysterious errands
of his own. One day I stumbled upon some of his handiwork far down
the ground. He had half buried the polo-ball in dust, and stuck six
shrivelled old marigold flowers in a circle round it. Outside that
circle again, was a rude square, traced out in bits of red brick
alternating with fragments of broken china; the whole bounded by a
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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 Gambara by Honore de Balzac: song-writing to opera, and cannot. He blames the managers, music-
sellers,--everybody, in fact, but himself, and he has no worse enemy.
You can see--what a florid complexion, what self-conceit, how little
firmness in his features! he is made to write ballads. The man who is
with him and looks like a match-hawker, is a great music celebrity--
Gigelmi, the greatest Italian conductor known; but he has gone deaf,
and is ending his days in penury, deprived of all that made it
tolerable. Ah! here comes our great Ottoboni, the most guileless old
fellow on earth; but he is suspected of being the most vindictive of
all who are plotting for the regeneration of Italy. I cannot think how
they can bear to banish such a good man."
Gambara |
