| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: There are certain horrible situations in which we come to no decision
till the moment when our friends discern our dishonor. We accept
compromises with ourself so long as we escape a censor who comes to
play prosecutor. Monsieur de Clagny, as clumsy as a tortured man, had
been torturing Dinah.
"To preserve my love I will be all that Madame de Pompadour was to
preserve her power," said she to herself when Monsieur de Clagny had
left her. And this phrase sufficiently proves that her love was
becoming a burden to her, and would presently be a toil rather than a
pleasure.
The part now assumed by Dinah was horribly painful, and Lousteau made
The Muse of the Department |
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 Jolly Corner by Henry James: him, on the jolly corner, as beguilingly as the slow opening bars
of some rich music follows the tap of the conductor's wand.
He always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stick
on the old marble of the hall pavement, large black-and-white
squares that he remembered as the admiration of his childhood and
that had then made in him, as he now saw, for the growth of an
early conception of style. This effect was the dim reverberating
tinkle as of some far-off bell hung who should say where? - in the
depths of the house, of the past, of that mystical other world that
might have flourished for him had he not, for weal or woe,
abandoned it. On this impression he did ever the same thing; he
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