Today's Stichomancy for Freddie Prinze Jr.

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

"And an attorney always manages to do it," said Cardot. "How many a time one of you has come to me with, 'What is there to be got out of the case?' "

"It is particularly easy to manage it if the debtor eggs you on to run up costs till they eat up the amount. And, as a rule, the Count's creditors took nothing by that move, and were out of pocket in law and personal expenses. To get money out of so experienced a debtor as the Count, a creditor should really be in a position uncommonly difficult to reach; it is a question of being creditor and debtor both, for then you are legally entitled to work the confusion of rights, in law language--"

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Dreams & Dust by Don Marquis:

thereby! Wakened and shaken and broken, For I hear in thy thunders terrific that throb through thy rapid veins The beat of the heart of a world.

A HYMN

(1914)

CLOTHED on with thunder and with steel And black against the dawn The whirling armies clash and reel. . . . A wind, and they are gone

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer, Detective by Mark Twain:

When the dog had dug down only a few inches he grabbed something and pulled it up, and it was an arm and a sleeve. Tom kind of gasped out, and says:

"Come away, Huck--it's found."

I just felt awful. We struck for the road and fetched the first men that come along. They got a spade at the crib and dug out the body, and you never see such an excitement. You couldn't make anything out of the face, but you didn't need to. Everybody said:

"Poor Jubiter; it's his clothes, to the last rag!"

Some rushed off to spread the news and tell the justice

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 Of The Nature of Things by Lucretius:

For then 'twere meet that ravens, as they fly, Should dartle from white pinions a white sheen, Or swans turn black from seed of black, or be Of any single varied dye thou wilt. Again, the more an object's rent to bits, The more thou see its colour fade away Little by little till 'tis quite extinct; As happens when the gaudy linen's picked Shred after shred away: the purple there, Phoenician red, most brilliant of all dyes, Is lost asunder, ravelled thread by thread;

Of The Nature of Things