Today's Stichomancy for Italo Calvino

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Contrast by Royall Tyler:

from the neglect and inattention it has heretofore met with. Besides, it possesses considerable intrinsic merit, and as an acting play will compare favorably with many of the English comedies of the period; and though, perhaps, meager in plot and incident, it is bright, humorous, and natural; the dialogue is sparkling with genuine wit; and its satire aimed at the evils and follies of the time is keen and incisive. The contrast between the plain and simple honesty of purpose and breeding of our American home life and the tinseled though polished hypocrisy and knavery of foreign

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain:

Government; for poor sailors, tossed by stormy seas; for the oppressed millions groaning under the heel of European monarchies and Oriental despotisms; for such as have the light and the good tidings, and yet have not eyes to see nor ears to hear withal; for the heathen in the far islands of the sea; and closed with a supplication that the words he was about to speak might find grace and favor, and be as seed sown in fertile ground, yielding in time a grateful harvest of good. Amen.

There was a rustling of dresses, and the standing congregation sat down. The boy whose history this

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Scenes from a Courtesan's Life by Honore de Balzac:

hulks are called the meadow (le pre), philologists must admire the inventiveness of these horrible vocables, as Charles Nodier would have said.

The high antiquity of this kind of slang is also noteworthy. A tenth of the words are of old Romanesque origin, another tenth are the old Gaulish French of Rabelais. Effondrer, to thrash a man, to give him what for; otolondrer, to annoy or to "spur" him; cambrioler, doing anything in a room; aubert, money; Gironde, a beauty (the name of a river of Languedoc); fouillousse, a pocket--a "cly"--are all French of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The word affe, meaning life, is of the highest antiquity. From affe anything that disturbs life is

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 New Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson:

In vain; for when the lamp is lit And by the laughing fire I sit, Still with the tattered atlas spread Interminable roads I tread.

ENVOY FOR "A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES"

WHETHER upon the garden seat You lounge with your uplifted feet Under the May's whole Heaven of blue; Or whether on the sofa you, No grown up person being by, Do some soft corner occupy;