| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain: With all her splendid common sense and practical everyday ability,
Roxy was a doting fool of a mother. She was this toward her child--
and she was also more than this: by the fiction created by herself,
he was become her master; the necessity of recognizing this relation
outwardly and of perfecting herself in the forms required to express
the recognition, had moved her to such diligence and faithfulness in
practicing these forms that this exercise soon concreted itself into habit;
it became automatic and unconscious; then a natural result followed:
deceptions intended solely for others gradually grew practically
into self-deceptions as well; the mock reverence became real reverence,
the mock homage real homage; the little counterfeit rift of separation
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: since nature had not inflicted on him the obstacles men take most
pride in defying.
A man, like many another, of complex nature, he was easily fascinated
by the comfort of luxury, without which he could hardly have lived;
and, in the same way, he clung to the social distinctions which his
principles contemned. Thus his theories as an artist, a thinker, and a
poet were in frequent antagonism with his tastes, his feelings, and
his habits as a man of rank and wealth; but he comforted himself for
his inconsistencies by recognizing them in many Parisians, like
himself liberal by policy and aristocrats by nature.
Hence it was not without some uneasiness that he found himself, on
Gambara |
