Today's Stichomancy for Cindy Crawford

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Pathology of Lying, Etc. by William and Mary Healy:

one occasion new fabrications were evolved in the same interview that Robert had begged in fairly tragic fashion to be helped to cure himself of his inclination to falsify.

A great love of the dramatic was always displayed by this boy, which may largely account for the evolution of his lying into long and complicated stories. When truant one day he boldly visited the school for truants, and when under probation, after having fallen into the hands of the police two or three times, he impersonated a policeman. The latter was such a remarkable occurrence and led to such a peculiar situation that much notice of it was taken in the newspapers. The incongruity between

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato:

shocking to the contemporary of Thucydides and Plato in anacolutha and repetitions. In such cases the genius of the English language requires that the translation should be more intelligible than the Greek. The want of more distinctions between the demonstrative pronouns is also greatly felt. Two genitives dependent on one another, unless familiarised by idiom, have an awkward effect in English. Frequently the noun has to take the place of the pronoun. 'This' and 'that' are found repeating themselves to weariness in the rough draft of a translation. As in the previous case, while the feeling of the modern language is more opposed to tautology, there is also a greater difficulty in avoiding it.

(5) Though no precise rule can be laid down about the repetition of words,

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad:

had no eyes for anything but the Diana. It was she, then, was being taken away. She was already out of her berth and shooting athwart the river. "The way this loonatic plucked that ship out is a cau- tion," said the awed voice of my mate close to my ear. "Hey! Hallo! Falk! Hermann! What's this infernal trick?" I yelled in a fury.

Nobody heard me. Falk certainly could not hear me. His tug was turning at full speed away under the other bank. The wire hawser between her and the Diana, stretched as taut as a harpstring,

Falk

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 Tarzan the Untamed by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

built, and here, in the fast-waning light, Tarzan thought that between two buildings he caught the glint of water, but of that he was not sure. His experience of the centers of civiliza- tion naturally inclined him to believe that this central area was a plaza about which the larger buildings were grouped and that there would be the most logical place to search first for Bertha Kircher and her companion.

And then the sun went down and darkness quickly en- veloped the city -- a darkness that was accentuated for the ape-man rather than relieved by the artificial lights which immediately appeared in many of the windows visible to him.

Tarzan the Untamed