Today's Stichomancy for Neal Stephenson

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from King Henry VI by William Shakespeare:

Unto my brother, Archbishop of York. When I have fought with Pembroke and his fellows, I'll follow you and tell what answer Lewis and the Lady Bona send to him.-- Now, for a while farewell, good Duke of York.

KING EDWARD. What fates impose, that men must needs abide; It boots not to resist both wind and tide.

[Exit King Edward, led out; Somerset with him.]

OXFORD. What now remains, my lords, for us to do,

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn:

Carmen was unusually busy, Chita went there.

In the early days of the settlement, a Spanish fisherman had died; and his comrades had built him a little tomb with the surplus of the same bricks and other material brought down the bayou for the construction of Viosca's cottages. But no one, except perhaps some wandering duck hunter, had approached the sepulchre for years. High weeds and grasses wrestled together all about it, and rendered it totally invisible from the surrounding level of the marsh.

Fiddlers swarmed away as Chita advanced over the moist soil, each uplifting its single huge claw as it sidled off;--then frogs

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato:

distinguish between them, their transcendental character is lost; ideas of justice, temperance, and good, are really distinguishable only with reference to their application in the world. If we once ask how they are related to individuals or to the ideas of the divine mind, they are again merged in the aboriginal notion of Being. No one can answer the questions which Parmenides asks of Socrates. And yet these questions are asked with the express acknowledgment that the denial of ideas will be the destruction of the human mind. The true answer to the difficulty here thrown out is the establishment of a rational psychology; and this is a work which is commenced in the Sophist. Plato, in urging the difficulty of his own doctrine of Ideas, is far from denying that some doctrine of Ideas 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 The Economist by Xenophon:

heat and cold, wayfaring and military marches; or, to repeat, He laid upon his shoulders the outdoor works.

[23] "Straightway from the moment of birth provided." Cf. (Aristot.) "Oecon." i. 3, a work based upon or at any rate following the lines of Xenophon's treatise.

"While in creating the body of woman with less capacity for these things," I continued, "God would seem to have imposed on her the indoor works; and knowing that He had implanted in the woman and imposed upon her the nurture of new-born babies, He endowed her with a larger share of affection for the new-born child than He bestowed upon man.[24] And since He imposed on woman the guardianship of the things