In VN’s novel Ada (1969), the element that destroys Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father who in March 1905 perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific) is air:
Numbers and rows and series — the nightmare and malediction harrowing pure thought and pure time — seemed bent on mechanizing his mind. Three elements, fire, water, and air, destroyed, in that sequence, Marina, Lucette, and Demon. Terra waited. (3.1)
The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph has power over air. El Aleph (The Aleph, 1945) is a story by J. L. Borges (an Argentine writer, 1899-1986). The action in it takes place in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina (J. L. Borges's home city). Buenos Aires means in Spanish "good air." When Van describes his nights at Ardis, Ada takes over and mentions a minty whiff of Summer Savory or Yerba Buena on a coastal slope that has to be smelled through the transparency of death and ardent beauty:
Hammock and honey: eighty years later he could still recall with the young pang of the original joy his falling in love with Ada. Memory met imagination halfway in the hammock of his boyhood’s dawns. At ninety-four he liked retracing that first amorous summer not as a dream he had just had but as a recapitulation of consciousness to sustain him in the small gray hours between shallow sleep and the first pill of the day. Take over, dear, for a little while. Pill, pillow, billow, billions. Go on from here, Ada, please.
(She). Billions of boys. Take one fairly decent decade. A billion of Bills, good, gifted, tender and passionate, not only spiritually but physically well-meaning Billions, have bared the jillions of their no less tender and brilliant Jills during that decade, at stations and under conditions that have to be controlled and specified by the worker, lest the entire report be choked up by the weeds of statistics and waist-high generalizations. No point would there be, if we left out, for example, the little matter of prodigious individual awareness and young genius, which makes, in some cases, of this or that particular gasp an unprecedented and unrepeatable event in the continuum of life or at least a thematic anthemia of such events in a work of art, or a denouncer’s article. The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I’m all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact — that among those billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperatorskaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, if the decade has a scorpion tail after all), the particularities of their love-making influence in a special unique way two long lives and a few readers, those pensive reeds, and their pens and mental paintbrushes. Natural history indeed! Unnatural history — because that precision of senses and sense must seem unpleasantly peculiar to peasants, and because the detail is all: The song of a Tuscan Firecrest or a Sitka Kinglet in a cemetery cypress; a minty whiff of Summer Savory or Yerba Buena on a coastal slope; the dancing flitter of a Holly Blue or an Echo Azure — combined with other birds, flowers and butterflies: that has to be heard, smelled and seen through the transparency of death and ardent beauty. And the most difficult: beauty itself as perceived through the there and then. The males of the firefly (now it’s really your turn, Van). (1.12)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): pensive reeds: Pascal’s metaphor of man, un roseau pensant.
La esfera de Pascal ("The Sphere of Pascal," 1951) is an essay by J. L. Borges. In his essay Borges mentions the particles of earth, water, air and fire that make up a sphere without end:
It may be that universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors. The purpose of this note will be to sketch a chapter of this history.
Six centuries before the Christian era, the rhapsodist Xenophanes of Colophon, wearied of the Homeric verses he recited from city to city, lashed out at the poets who attributed anthropomorphic traits to the gods, and offered the Greeks a single God, a god who was an eternal sphere. In the Timaeus of Plato we read that the sphere is the most perfect and most uniform figure, for all points of its surface are equidistant from its center; Olof Gigon (Ursprung der griechischen Philosophie, 183) understands Xenophanes to speak analogically: God is spherical because that form is best -- or least inadequate -- to represent the Divinity. Parmenides, forty years later, rephrased the image: "The Divine Being is like the mass of a well-rounded sphere, whose force is constant from the center in any direction." Calogero and Mondolfo reasoned that Parmenides intuited an infinite, or infinitely expanding sphere, and that the words just transcribed possess a dynamic meaning (Albertelli: Gli Eleati, 148). Parmenides taught in Italy; a few years after his death, the Sicilian Empedocles of Agrigentum constructed a laborious cosmogony: a stage exists in which the particles of earth, water, air and fire make up a sphere without end, "the rounded Sphairos, which exults in its circular solitude."