Today's Stichomancy for Franz Kafka

The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Enoch Arden, &c. by Alfred Tennyson:

But the first that ever I bare was dead before he was born, Shadow and shine is life, little Annie, flower and thorn.

XVI. That was the first time, too, that ever I thought of death. There lay the sweet little body that never had drawn a breath. I had not wept, little Anne, not since I had been a wife;