| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Adieu by Honore de Balzac: the booty, and was now sitting beside the fire, wrapped in a white
sheet by way of cloak, and turning carefully on the embers a slice of
the mare. Philippe saw upon his face the joy these preparations gave
him. The Comte de Vandieres, who, for the last few days, had fallen
into a state of second childhood, was seated on a cushion beside his
wife, looking fixedly at the fire, which was beginning to thaw his
torpid limbs. He had shown no emotion of any kind, either at
Philippe's danger, or at the fight which ended in the pillage of the
carriage and their expulsion from it.
At first de Sucy took the hand of the young countess, as if to show
her his affection, and the grief he felt at seeing her reduced to such
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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: even in their sexual relations towards offspring, those differences which
we, conventionally, are apt to suppose are inherent in the paternal or the
maternal sex form, are not inherent--as when one studies the lives of
certain toads, where the female deposits her eggs in cavities on the back
of the male, where the eggs are preserved and hatched; or, of certain sea
animals, in which the male carries the young about with him and rears them
in a pouch formed of his own substance; and countless other such. And
above all, this important fact, which had first impressed me when as a
child I wandered alone in the African bush and watched cock-o-veets singing
their inter-knit love-songs, and small singing birds building their nests
together, and caring for and watching over, not only their young, but each
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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 Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: There is hardly any love of anything in "Smoke" and hardly any
poetry. The only thing it shows love for is light and playful
adultery, and for that reason the poetry of the story is repulsive.
. . . I am timid in expressing this opinion, because I cannot form
a sober judgment about an author whose personality I dislike.
In 1865, before the final breach with Turgénieff, he wrote,
again to Fet: "I do not like 'Enough'! A personal subjective
treatment is never good unless it is full of life and passion; but
the subjectivity in this case is full of lifeless suffering.
In the autumn of 1883, after Turgénieff's death, when
the family had gone into Moscow for the winter, my father stayed at
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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 Walden by Henry David Thoreau: thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so
early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of
their iron steed are frozen. On this morning of the Great Snow,
perchance, which is still raging and chilling men's blood, I bear
the muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their
chilled breath, which announces that the cars are coming, without
long delay, notwithstanding the veto of a New England northeast
snow-storm, and I behold the plowmen covered with snow and rime,
their heads peering, above the mould-board which is turning down
other than daisies and the nests of field mice, like bowlders of the
Sierra Nevada, that occupy an outside place in the universe.
Walden |
