Today's Stichomancy for John Von Neumann

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Margret Howth: A Story of To-day by Rebecca Harding Davis:

up to heaven a discord, unintelligible, hopeless,--the great blind world, astray since the first ages! Was there no hope, no help?

The sun shone down, as it had done for six thousand years; it shone on open problems in the lives of these men and women, of these dogs and horses who walked the streets, problems whose end and beginning no eye could read. There were places where it did not shine: down in the fetid cellars, in the slimy cells of the prison yonder: what riddles of life lay there he dared not think of. God knows how the man groped for the light,--for any voice to make earth and heaven clear to him.

Margret Howth: A Story of To-day

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Othello by William Shakespeare:

Othe. What? Did they neuer whisper? Aemil. Neuer my Lord

Othe. Nor send you out o'th' way? Aemil. Neuer

Othe. To fetch her Fan, her Gloues, her Mask, nor nothing? Aemil. Neuer my Lord

Othe. That's strange. Aemil. I durst (my Lord) to wager, she is honest: Lay downe my Soule at stake: If you thinke other, Remoue your thought. It doth abuse your bosome: If any wretch haue put this in your head,

Othello

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne:

their ancestry.

THE WEDDING KNELL

There is a certain church in the city of New York which I have always regarded with peculiar interest, on account of a marriage there solemnized, under very singular circumstances, in my grandmother's girlhood. That venerable lady chanced to be a spectator of the scene, and ever after made it her favorite narrative. Whether the edifice now standing on the same site be the identical one to which she referred, I am not antiquarian enough to know; nor would it be worth while to correct myself, perhaps, of an agreeable error, by reading the date of its

Twice Told Tales

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 Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson:

their feet apart - and blood running thick from the nostrils of the mare. We got out Fanny's under-clothes - couldn't find anything else but our blankets - to rub them down, and in about half an hour we had the blessed satisfaction to see one after the other take a bite or two of grass. But it was a toucher; a little more and these steeds would have been foundered.

MONDAY, 31ST? NOVEMBER.

Near a week elapsed, and no journal. On Monday afternoon, Moors rode up and I rode down with him, dined, and went over in the evening to the American Consulate; present, Consul-