Below the trills of the violin, the insistent bass viol, the chords seeming to reign in, finally, every frivolous note. Once I saw a skylark ascend and hover, fly a tight circle, ascend higher, twirl, ascend again, then plummet two hundred feet before flying out and off across the cliffs that rimmed a sea. Perhaps this show attracts a mate, but freedom looked incarnate in that bird's flight. Unstable introverts resemble Galen's melancholics who had, he believed, too much black bile in them. For these gloomy brooders, uncertainty is the ground of each day's small resurrections.
Sanguine people are cheerful and unaccountably optimistic.
Hansel was sensuous, Gretel intuitive, although when push came to shove she found some gumption, having developed her opposite pole, aggression rising up like a sudden gush of yellow bile in a choleric. Kretschmer called people who were broad, fat, short and tended to mood swings, pyknics. One classifier of types believes people tend to like objects similar in shape to themselves. When I was a child my aunts would whisper to me, your mother's high-strung, words meant to explain her bouts of weeping and why she would lock herself in her bedroom in the middle of the afternoon. Because the line between nature and nurture wavers like the silhouettes of two hootchy-kootchy dancers, who we are, like aftershocks, escapes whatever we say about ourselves or others, the self transient, mercurial and too complex to type.