Today's Stichomancy for Douglas MacArthur

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac:

characteristics in a certain completeness and unity informed by her charm. Nothing was feigned. The passion or semi-passion, the ineffectual high aspirations, the actual pettiness, the coolness of sentiment and warmth of impulse, were all spontaneous and unaffected, and as much the outcome of her own position as of the position of the aristocracy to which she belonged. She was wholly self-contained; she put herself proudly above the world and beneath the shelter of her name. There was something of the egoism of Medea in her life, as in the life of the aristocracy that lay a-dying, and would not so much as raise itself or stretch out a hand to any political physician; so well aware of

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

and houses,--if without these we could satisfy the wants of the body, they would be of no use to us for that purpose?

ERYXIAS: They would not.

SOCRATES: They would no longer be regarded as wealth, because they are useless, whereas that would be wealth which enabled us to obtain what was useful to us?

ERYXIAS: O Socrates, you will never be able to persuade me that gold and silver and similar things are not wealth. But I am very strongly of opinion that things which are useless to us are not wealth, and that the money which is useful for this purpose is of the greatest use; not that these things are not useful towards life, if by them we can procure wealth.

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from I Have A Dream by Martin Luther King, Jr.:

Delivered on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.

But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the

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 Profits of Religion by Upton Sinclair:

privacy guaranteed you by law has been taken from you by corrupt court officials, who have sold copies of the testimony to the newspapers, so that all the intimate details of where you slept and where your wife slept and what you saw your wife doing have been thrown out to journalistic jackals, who scream with glee as they rend the carcass of your dead love. And in the end, perhaps, you find that you have gone through this horror for nothing--the august court with its Roman Catholic judge throws out your petition, its suspicions having been excited by the fact that when you discovered your domestic tragedy, you sought to behave like a civilized person, with pity and self-restraint, instead of