| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: lights, seemed to me to have altered its character; it had certainly
grown ghastly; violet tones were spreading over it; you might have
thought it the cadaverous head of a dying man. Motionless as the
personages painted on a diorama, his stupefied eyes were fixed on the
sparkling facets of a cut-glass stopper, but certainly without
observing them; he seemed to be engulfed in some weird contemplation
of the future or the past. When I had long examined that puzzling face
I began to reflect about it. "Is he ill?" I said to myself. "Has he
drunk too much wine? Is he ruined by a drop in the Funds? Is he
thinking how to cheat his creditors?"
"Look!" I said to my neighbor, pointing out to her the face of the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: cipher out how much mightier he was, on sitting down again,
than when he first started. And whenever he flung himself on
the earth to take a little repose, even if he got up the very
next instant, he would be as strong as exactly ten just such
giants as his former self. It was well for the world that
Antaeus happened to be of a sluggish disposition and liked ease
better than exercise; for, if he had frisked about like the
Pygmies, and touched the earth as often as they did, he would
long ago have been strong enough to pull down the sky about
people's ears. But these great lubberly fellows resemble
mountains, not only in bulk, but in their disinclination to
Tanglewood Tales |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: some holiday excursion, we may have looked into the windows of a
cottage in a flower-garden and seen a certain weaver plying his
shuttle. And these were all kinsmen of mine upon the other side;
and from the eyes of the lamp and oil man one-half of my unborn
father, and one-quarter of myself, looked out upon us as we went by
to college. Nothing of all this would cross the mind of the young
student, as he posted up the Bridges with trim, stockinged legs, in
that city of cocked hats and good Scotch still unadulterated. It
would not cross his mind that he should have a daughter; and the
lamp and oil man, just then beginning, by a not unnatural
metastasis, to bloom into a lighthouse-engineer, should have a
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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 A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: character, for why should the memory of these beings, seen in
their obscure, sun-bathed existence, demand to express itself in
the shape of a novel, except on the ground of that mysterious
fellowship which unites in a community of hopes and fears all the
dwellers on this earth?
I did not receive my visitors with boisterous rapture as the
bearers of any gifts of profit or fame. There was no vision of a
printed book before me as I sat writing at that table, situated
in a decayed part of Belgravia. After all these years, each
leaving its evidence of slowly blackened pages, I can honestly
say that it is a sentiment akin to pity which prompted me to
A Personal Record |
