| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Ann Veronica by H. G. Wells: suppression, unless I'm very much mistaken; a child-expelling
instinct. . . . I wonder. . . . There's no family uniting
instinct, anyhow; it's habit and sentiment and material
convenience hold families together after adolescence. There's
always friction, conflict, unwilling concessions. Always! I
don't believe there is any strong natural affection at all
between parents and growing-up children. There wasn't, I know,
between myself and my father. I didn't allow myself to see
things as they were in those days; now I do. I bored him. I
hated him. I suppose that shocks one's ideas. . . . It's true.
. . . There are sentimental and traditional deferences and
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: Sabbath on the Brocken. Or it will be a quite harmless broom, on which
he will hang the coat of a clerk in the Treasury. Decamps had in his
brush what Paganini had in his bow--a magnetically communicative
power.
Well, I should have to transfer to my style that striking genius, that
marvelous knack of the pencil, to depict the upright, tall, lean man
dressed in black, with black hair, who stood there without speaking a
word. This gentleman had a face like a knife-blade, cold and harsh,
with a color like Seine water when it was muddy and strewn with
fragments of charcoal from a sunken barge. He looked at the floor,
listening and passing judgment. His attitude was terrifying. He stood
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