Today's Stichomancy for Martin Luther King Jr.
| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling: 'rickshaw came down in a hurry, and in the 'rickshaw sat the living,
breathing image of the girl who had made him so happily unhappy.
Hannasyde leaned against the railing and gasped. He wanted to run
downhill after the 'rickshaw, but that was impossible; so he went
forward with most of his blood in his temples. It was impossible,
for many reasons, that the woman in the 'rickshaw could be the girl
he had known. She was, he discovered later, the wife of a man from
Dindigul, or Coimbatore, or some out-of-the-way place, and she had
come up to Simla early in the season for the good of her health.
She was going back to Dindigul, or wherever it was, at the end of
the season; and in all likelihood would never return to Simla again,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells: who have learned the way how. It may be in my time, even--
those men. Fancy having one of them lovely things, with its
Heat-Ray wide and free! Fancy having it in control! What
would it matter if you smashed to smithereens at the end of
the run, after a bust like that? I reckon the Martians'll open
their beautiful eyes! Can't you see them, man? Can't you see
them hurrying, hurrying--puffing and blowing and hooting to
their other mechanical affairs? Something out of gear in every
case. And swish, bang, rattle, swish! Just as they are fum-
bling over it, SWISH comes the Heat-Ray, and, behold! man
has come back to his own."
 War of the Worlds |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Within the Tides by Joseph Conrad: peace, stillness, sunshine reigning everywhere, the doors and
windows of the bungalow standing wide open, no sight of a human
being anywhere, the plants growing rank and tall on the deserted
fields. For hours the Editor and the schooner's crew, excited by
the mystery, roamed over the island shouting Renouard's name; and
at last set themselves in grim silence to explore systematically
the uncleared bush and the deeper ravines in search of his corpse.
What had happened? Had he been murdered by the boys? Or had he
simply, capricious and secretive, abandoned his plantation taking
the people with him. It was impossible to tell what had happened.
At last, towards the decline of the day, the Editor and the sailing
 Within the Tides |
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 Cratylus by Plato: expression of motion; and he frequently uses the letter for this purpose:
for example, in the actual words rein and roe he represents motion by rho;
also in the words tromos (trembling), trachus (rugged); and again, in words
such as krouein (strike), thrauein (crush), ereikein (bruise), thruptein
(break), kermatixein (crumble), rumbein (whirl): of all these sorts of
movements he generally finds an expression in the letter R, because, as I
imagine, he had observed that the tongue was most agitated and least at
rest in the pronunciation of this letter, which he therefore used in order
to express motion, just as by the letter iota he expresses the subtle
elements which pass through all things. This is why he uses the letter
iota as imitative of motion, ienai, iesthai. And there is another class of
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