| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: puts all sorts of rubbish into his liquor--Indian wood and burnt cork
and elderberry juice, the villain! Nevertheless, get him to produce a
bottle from what he calls his 'special cellar,' and you will fancy
yourself in the seventh heaven of delight. And what quantities of
champagne we drank! Compared with it, provincial stuff is kvass[1].
Try to imagine not merely Clicquot, but a sort of blend of Clicquot
and Matradura--Clicquot of double strength. Also Ponomarev produced a
bottle of French stuff which he calls 'Bonbon.' Had it a bouquet, ask
you? Why, it had the bouquet of a rose garden, of anything else you
like. What times we had, to be sure! Just after we had left Pnomarev's
place, some prince or another arrived in the town, and sent out for
Dead Souls |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe: said I would freely trust him with the management of that little
I had, if he would accept to be steward for a poor widow that
could give him no salary.
He smiled and, standing up, with great respect saluted me.
He told me he could not but take it very kindly that I had so
good an opinion of him; that he would not deceive me, that
he would do anything in his power to serve me, and expect
no salary; but that he could not by any means accept of a trust,
that it might bring him to be suspected of self-interest, and that
if I should die he might have disputes with my executors, which
he should be very loth to encumber himself with.
Moll Flanders |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Margret Howth: A Story of To-day by Rebecca Harding Davis: life, and made much of it, and rejoiced over it. She grew
bewildered, sometimes, lying on her wooden settle by the fire;
people lead always been friendly, taken care of her, but now they
were eager in their kindness, as though the time were short. She
did not understand the reason, at first; she did not want to die:
yet if it hurt her, when it grew clear at last, no one knew it;
it was not her way to speak of pain. Only, as she grew weaker,
day by day, she began to set her house in order, as one might
say, in a quaint, almost comical fashion, giving away everything
she owned, down to her treasures of colored bottles and
needle-books, mending her father's clothes, and laying them out
Margret Howth: A Story of To-day |
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 Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: "Balthazar, are you so very busy? this is the thirty-third Sunday
since you have been to mass or vespers."
Claes did not answer; his wife bowed her head, clasped her hands, and
waited: she knew that his silence meant neither contempt nor
indifference, only a tyrannous preoccupation. Balthazar was one of
those beings who preserve deep in their souls and after long years all
their youthful delicacy of feeling; he would have thought it criminal
to wound by so much as a word a woman weighed down by the sense of
physical disfigurement. No man knew better than he that a look, a
word, suffices to blot out years of happiness, and is the more cruel
because it contrasts with the unfailing tenderness of the past: our
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