Today's Stichomancy for Liza Minnelli

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The War in the Air by H. G. Wells:

disorganisation, phase by phase, that closed the chapter of the Empire of the West! They could not, because they did not, they had not the will to arrest it. What mankind could achieve with a different will is a speculation as idle as it is magnificent. And this was no slow decadence that came to the Europeanised world; those other civilisations rotted and crumbled down, the Europeanised civilisation was, as it were, blown up. Within the space of five years it was altogether disintegrated and destroyed. Up to the very eve of the War in the Air one sees a spacious spectacle of incessant advance, a world-wide security, enormous areas with highly organised industry and settled

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin:

part of the message which Isaiah was ordered to "lift up his voice like a trumpet" in declaring to the gentlemen of his day: "Ye fast for strife, and to smite with the fist of wickedness. Is not this the fast that I have chosen, to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor THAT ARE CAST OUT (margin, 'afflicted') to THY house?" The falsehood on which the writer had mentally founded himself, as previously stated by him, was this: "To confound the functions of the dispensers of the poor-rates with those of the dispensers of a charitable institution is a great and pernicious error." This sentence is so accurately and exquisitely wrong, that its substance must be thus reversed in our minds before we can deal

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad:

of. For who on earth would dream of Chinamen? . . .

I went aft, ascended the poop, where, under the awning, gleamed the brasses of the yacht-like fittings, the polished surfaces of the rails, the glass of the skylights. Right aft two seamen, busy cleaning the steering gear, with the reflected ripples of light running playfully up their bent backs, went on with their work, unaware of me and of the al- most affectionate glance I threw at them in passing toward the companion-way of the cabin.

The doors stood wide open, the slide was pushed

The Shadow Line

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 Pathology of Lying, Etc. by William and Mary Healy:

apology repeatedly for her misconduct.

``Let me come and tell you all. The time has come when things must stop, therefore I feel that I must talk to someone. I have lived a lie from the day I was born until now.''

After these letters she went on making false statements which could readily be checked up. Nothing is any more curious in Gertrude's case than the anomaly of her telling several of us who tried to help her that up to the time of the given interview she had not thoroughly realized how bad it was to lie, and how she now felt keenly that she must cease, while perhaps at the end of the very same interview a reaction to a new situation would