| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Ann Veronica by H. G. Wells: and further expectations through my aunt, so that I can offer you
a life of wide and generous refinement, travel, books,
discussion, and easy relations with a circle of clever and
brilliant and thoughtful people with whom my literary work has
brought me into contact, and of which, seeing me only as you have
done alone in Morningside Park, you can have no idea. I have a
certain standing not only as a singer but as a critic, and I
belong to one of the most brilliant causerie dinner clubs of the
day, in which successful Bohemianism, politicians, men of
affairs, artists, sculptors, and cultivated noblemen generally,
mingle together in the easiest and most delightful intercourse.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: morality as well as of art. Partiality is immorality; for
any book is wrong that gives a misleading picture of the
world and life. The trouble is that the weakling must be
partial; the work of one proving dank and depressing; of
another, cheap and vulgar; of a third, epileptically sensual;
of a fourth, sourly ascetic. In literature as in conduct,
you can never hope to do exactly right. All you can do is to
make as sure as possible; and for that there is but one rule.
Nothing should be done in a hurry that can be done slowly.
It is no use to write a book and put it by for nine or even
ninety years; for in the writing you will have partly
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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 Research Magnificent by H. G. Wells: that his very silences were effective. She loved him immensely, and
she had tremendous ambitions for him and through him.
And also London, the very thought of London, filled her with
appetite. Her soul thirsted for London. It was like some enormous
juicy fruit waiting for her pretty white teeth, a place almost large
enough to give her avidity the sense of enough. She felt it waiting
for her, household, servants, a carriage, shops and the jolly
delight of buying and possessing things, the opera, first-nights,
picture exhibitions, great dinner-parties, brilliant lunch parties,
crowds seen from a point of vantage, the carriage in a long string
of fine carriages with the lamplit multitude peering, Amanda in 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 Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: nothing but the drawbacks.
Brillat-Savarin has deliberately set himself to justify the
gastronome, but perhaps even he has not dwelt sufficiently on the
reality of the pleasures of the table. The demands of digestion upon
the human economy produce an internal wrestling-bout of human forces
which rivals the highest degree of amorous pleasure. The gastronome is
conscious of an expenditure of vital power, an expenditure so vast
that the brain is atrophied (as it were), that a second brain, located
in the diaphragm, may come into play, and the suspension of all the
faculties is in itself a kind of intoxication. A boa constrictor
gorged with an ox is so stupid with excess that the creature is easily
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