| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Adieu by Honore de Balzac: She was often, they tell me, barefooted, and scarcely clothed; for
months together, she had no care, no food but what she could pick up;
sometimes kept in hospitals, sometimes driven away like an animal, God
alone knows the horrors that poor unfortunate creature has survived.
She was locked up in a madhouse, in a little town in Germany, at the
time her relatives, thinking her dead, divided her property. In 1816,
the grenadier Fleuriot was at an inn in Strasburg, where she went
after making her escape from the madhouse. Several peasants told the
grenadier that she had lived for a whole month in the forest, where
they had tracked her in vain, trying to catch her, but she had always
escaped them. I was then staying a few miles from Strasburg. Hearing
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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 Jolly Corner by Henry James: room shuttered and void, and yet so coming, with a great suppressed
start, on some quite erect confronting presence, something planted
in the middle of the place and facing him through the dusk. After
that visit to the house in construction he walked with his
companion to see the other and always so much the better one, which
in the eastward direction formed one of the corners, - the "jolly"
one precisely, of the street now so generally dishonoured and
disfigured in its westward reaches, and of the comparatively
conservative Avenue. The Avenue still had pretensions, as Miss
Staverton said, to decency; the old people had mostly gone, the old
names were unknown, and here and there an old association seemed to
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: had carefully covered it first with a wall or fortification, and
then with a grove of trees, and as they were now fully convinced
their safety consisted entirely in their being concealed, they set
to work to cover and conceal the place yet more effectually than
before. For this purpose, as I planted trees, or rather thrust in
stakes, which in time all grew up to be trees, for some good
distance before the entrance into my apartments, they went on in
the same manner, and filled up the rest of that whole space of
ground from the trees I had set quite down to the side of the
creek, where I landed my floats, and even into the very ooze where
the tide flowed, not so much as leaving any place to land, or any
Robinson Crusoe |
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 Prufrock/Other Observations by T. S. Eliot: You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters,
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Prufrock/Other Observations |
