Today's Stichomancy for Martin Scorsese

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

at eight o'clock to take the wafer at Saint-Etienne. Father Goriot started off somewhere with a parcel, and the student won't be back from his lecture till ten o'clock. I saw them go while I was sweeping the stairs; Father Goriot knocked up against me, and his parcel was as hard as iron. What is the old fellow up to, I wonder? He is as good as a plaything for the rest of them; they can never let him alone; but he is a good man, all the same, and worth more than all of them put together. He doesn't give you much himself, but he sometimes sends you with a message to ladies who fork out famous tips; they are dressed grandly, too."

"His daughters, as he calls them, eh? There are a dozen of them."

Father Goriot

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley:

and the materials I had collected, resolving to finish my labours in some obscure nook in the northern highlands of Scotland.

We quitted London on the 27th of March and remained a few days at Windsor, rambling in its beautiful forest. This was a new scene to us mountaineers; the majestic oaks, the quantity of game, and the herds of stately deer were all novelties to us.

From thence we proceeded to Oxford. As we entered this city our minds were filled with the remembrance of the events that had been transacted there more than a century and a half before. It was here that Charles I had collected his forces. This city had remained faithful to him, after the whole nation had forsaken his

Frankenstein

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from U. S. Project Trinity Report by Carl Maag and Steve Rohrer:

measurable exposures of the personnel who had been positioned there. However, fallout activity was later detected in the north shelter area, proof that part of the cloud did head in that direction. This also explains why the monitoring device detected rising radiation levels (1; 12).

After ascertaining that radiation levels along the roads leading from the shelters to Broadway were within acceptable limits, the radiological safety monitors and military police established roadblocks at important intersections leading to ground zero. The north shelter monitor and military police set up a post where the North Shelter Road ran into Broadway. The west shelter monitor and a

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 The Human Drift by Jack London:

that in all my life I never went through more torment and mental suffering than on that lonely night-watch on the Sophie Sutherland.

(TO THE EDITOR.--This is not a fiction. It is a true page out of my life.)

A CLASSIC OF THE SEA

Introduction to "Two Years before the Mast."

Once in a hundred years is a book written that lives not alone for its own century but which becomes a document for the future centuries. Such a book is Dana's. When Marryat's and Cooper's sea novels are gone to dust, stimulating and joyful as they have