Today's Stichomancy for David Geffen

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Heroes by Charles Kingsley:

ships came nearer every hour.

Then Medeia, the dark witch-maiden, laid a cruel and a cunning plot; for she killed Absyrtus her young brother, and cast him into the sea, and said, 'Ere my father can take up his corpse and bury it, he must wait long, and be left far behind.'

And all the heroes shuddered, and looked one at the other for shame; yet they did not punish that dark witch-woman, because she had won for them the golden fleece.

And when Aietes came to the place he saw the floating corpse; and he stopped a long while, and bewailed his son, and took

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Love Songs by Sara Teasdale:

And green Ravello dreaming on her height; I have remembered music in the dark, The clean swift brightness of a fugue of Bach's, And running water singing on the rocks When once in English woods I heard a lark.

But all remembered beauty is no more Than a vague prelude to the thought of you -- You are the rarest soul I ever knew, Lover of beauty, knightliest and best; My thoughts seek you as waves that seek the shore, And when I think of you, I am at rest.

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Camille by Alexandre Dumas:

About midnight a carriage that I knew well stopped before No. 9. The Comte de G. got down and entered the house, after sending away the carriage. For a moment I hoped that the same answer would be given to him as to me, and that I should see him come out; but at four o'clock in the morning I was still awaiting him.

I have suffered deeply during these last three weeks, but that is nothing, I think, in comparison with what I suffered that night.

Chapter 14

When I reached home I began to cry like a child. There is no man to whom a woman has not been unfaithful, once at least, and who will not know what I suffered.

Camille

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 The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson:

communicate matter which is not worth learning. The danger of the idealist is, of course, to become merely null and lose all grip of fact, particularity, or passion.

We talk of bad and good. Everything, indeed, is good which is conceived with honesty and executed with communicative ardour. But though on neither side is dogmatism fitting, and though in every case the artist must decide for himself, and decide afresh and yet afresh for each succeeding work and new creation; yet one thing may be generally said, that we of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, breathing as we do the intellectual atmosphere of our age, are more apt to err