| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Hermione's Little Group of Serious Thinkers by Don Marquis: in one's own family!
Papa has very little real sympathy for my ad-
vanced ideas. And as for Mamma!
Sometimes I think I shall WRITE!
Express myself, my real Ego, in Song.
Not rhymes, of course. If I worked a year I
couldn't make two lines rhyme.
But rhyme is going out, anyhow.
Vers Libre is all the rage now.
We took it up not long ago -- our Little Group
of Serious Thinkers, you know -- and I feel con
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Psychology of Revolution by Gustave le Bon: Pierre Bayle, the true forerunner of Voltaire, recalled in the
following terms the consequences of popular government in
Athens:--
``If one considers this history, which displays at great length
the tumult of the assemblies, the factions dividing the city, the
seditious disturbing it, the most illustrious subjects
persecuted, exiled, and punished by death at the will of a
violent windbag, one would conclude that this people, which so
prided itself on its liberty, was really the slave of a small
number of caballers, whom they called demagogues, and who made it
turn now in this direction, now in that, as their passions
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Unconscious Comedians by Honore de Balzac: dignified response, Gazonal, in despair, thought it necessary to set
about seducing the charming Jenny, with whom he was by this time in
love. Leon de Lora and Bixiou left their victim in the hands of that
most roguish and frolicsome member of the anomalous society,--for
Jenny Cadine is the sole rival in that respect of the famous Dejazet.
At the supper-table, where Gazonal was fascinated by a silver service
made by the modern Benvenuto Cellini, Froment-Meurice, the contents of
which were worthy of the container, his mischievous friends were
careful to sit at some distance from him; but they followed with
cautious eye the manoeuvres of the clever actress, who, being
attracted by the insidious hope of getting her furniture renewed, was
|
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 Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: then, if my spirit and my body can be severed during sleep, why should
I not insist on their separating in the same way while I am awake? I
see no half-way mean between the two propositions.
"But if we go further into details: either the facts are due to the
action of a faculty which brings out a second being to whom my body is
merely a husk, since I was in my cell, and yet I saw the landscape--
and this upsets many systems; or the facts took place either in some
nerve centre, of which the name is yet to be discovered, where our
feelings dwell and move; or else in the cerebral centre, where ideas
are formed. This last hypothesis gives rise to some strange questions.
I walked, I saw, I heard. Motion is inconceivable but in space, sound
Louis Lambert |
