| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Unconscious Comedians by Honore de Balzac: streets are full of them. A Paganini? No, he's not great enough. A
hair-dresser, monsieur, a man who divines your soul and your habits,
in order to dress your hair conformably with your being, that man has
all that constitutes a philosopher--and such he is. See the women!
Women appreciate us; they know our value; our value to them is the
conquest they make when they have placed their heads in our hands to
attain a triumph. I say to you that a hair-dresser--the world does not
know what he is. I who speak to you, I am very nearly all that there
is of--without boasting I may say I am known--Still, I think more
might be done--The execution, that is everything! Ah! if women would
only give me carte blanche!--if I might only execute the ideas that
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: prayer enough. Poor old man, and poor old philosophy!
This he and his teachers had gained by despising the simpler and yet far
profounder doctrine of the Christian schools, that the Logos, the Divine
Teacher in whom both Christians and Heathens believed, was the very
archetype of men, and that He had proved that fact by being made flesh,
and dwelling bodily among them, that they might behold His glory, full
of grace and truth, and see that it was at once the perfection of man
and the perfection of God: that that which was most divine was most
human, and that which was most human, most divine. That was the outcome
of their metaphysic, that they had found the Absolute One; because One
existed in whom the apparent antagonism between that which is eternally
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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 War and the Future by H. G. Wells: in Dompierre that have altogether vanished at Fricourt; for
instance, there are quire large triangular pieces of the church
wall upstanding at Dompierre. And a mile away perhaps down the
hill on the road towards Amiens, the ruins of the sugar refinery
are very distinct. A sugar refinery is an affair of big iron
receptacles and great flues and pipes and so forth, and iron does
not go down under gun fire as stone or brick does. The whole
fabric wars rust, bent and twisted, gaping with shell holes, that
raggedest display of old iron, but it still kept its general
shape, as a smashed, battered, and sunken ironclad might do at
the bottom of the sea.
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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 The Time Machine by H. G. Wells: of hypertrophied raspberry and orange, but for the most part they
were strange.
`Between the tables was scattered a great number of cushions.
Upon these my conductors seated themselves, signing for me to do
likewise. With a pretty absence of ceremony they began to eat
the fruit with their hands, flinging peel and stalks, and so
forth, into the round openings in the sides of the tables. I was
not loath to follow their example, for I felt thirsty and hungry.
As I did so I surveyed the hall at my leisure.
`And perhaps the thing that struck me most was its dilapidated
look. The stained-glass windows, which displayed only a
The Time Machine |
