| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy: day, but he had promised Mariette to meet her at the theatre, and
though he knew that he ought not to keep that promise, he
deceived himself into the belief that it would not be right to
break his word.
"Am I capable of withstanding these temptations?" he asked
himself not quite honestly. "I shall try for the last time."
He dressed in his evening clothes, and arrived at the theatre
during the second act of the eternal Dame aux Camelias, in which
a foreign actress once again, and in a novel manner, showed how
women die of consumption.
The theatre was quite full. Mariette's box was at once, and with
Resurrection |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine and Mucedorus by William Shakespeare: In court thy courage shall be plainly known:
Throughout the Kingdom will I spread thy name,
To thy renown and never dying fame:
And that thy courage may be better known,
Bear thou the head of this most monstrous beast
In open sight to every courtiers view:
So will the king my father thee reward.
Come, let's away, and guard me to the court.
MUCEDORUS.
With all my heart.
[Exeunt.]
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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 Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: more he saw, the more he doubted. He watched men narrowly, and
saw how, beneath the surface, courage was often rashness; and
prudence, cowardice; generosity, a clever piece of calculation;
justice, a wrong; delicacy, pusillanimity; honesty, a modus
vivendi; and by some strange dispensation of fate, he must see
that those who at heart were really honest, scrupulous, just,
generous, prudent, or brave were held cheaply by their fellow-
men.
"What a cold-blooded jest!" said he to himself. "It was not
devised by a God."
From that time forth he renounced a better world, and never
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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 American by Henry James: But they appeared unreal to him; do what he would he somehow
could not believe in them. Sometimes he began to fear that there
was something the matter with his head; that his brain, perhaps,
had softened, and that the end of his strong activities had come.
This idea came back to him with an exasperating force. A hopeless,
helpless loafer, useful to no one and detestable to himself--
this was what the treachery of the Bellegardes had made of him.
In his restless idleness he came back from San Francisco
to New York, and sat for three days in the lobby of his hotel,
looking out through a huge wall of plate-glass at the unceasing
stream of pretty girls in Parisian-looking dresses, undulating past
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