Today's Stichomancy for Pierce Brosnan

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Scenes from a Courtesan's Life by Honore de Balzac:

"Where are the ten thousand francs?" asked Madame du Val-Noble.

"It is all the ready money I have," said Esther, smiling. "Open my table drawer; it is under the curl-papers."

"People who talk of dying never kill themselves," said Madame du Val- Noble. "If it were to commit----"

"A crime? For shame!" said Esther, finishing her friend's thought, as she hesitated. "Be quite easy, I have no intention of killing anybody. I had a friend--a very happy woman; she is dead, I must follow her-- that is all."

"How foolish!"

"How can I help it? I promised her I would."

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Drama on the Seashore by Honore de Balzac:

little peninsula in Brittany; it was far from the port, and so inaccessible that the coast-guard seldom thought it necessary to pass that way. To float in ether after floating on the wave!--ah! who would not have floated on the future as I did! Why was I thinking? Whence comes evil?--who knows! Ideas drop into our hearts or into our heads without consulting us. No courtesan was ever more capricious nor more imperious than conception is to artists; we must grasp it, like fortune, by the hair when it comes.

Astride upon my thought, like Astolphe on his hippogriff, I was galloping through worlds, suiting them to my fancy. Presently, as I looked about me to find some omen for the bold productions my wild

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw:

them. The rebellious, intractable, aggressive, selfish set provoke a corrective resistance, and do not pretend to high moral or religious sanctions; and they are never urged by grown-up people on young people. They are therefore more in danger of neglect or suppression than the other set, which have all the adults, all the laws, all the religions on their side. How is the child to be secured its due share of both bodies of doctrine?

The Schoolboy and the Homeboy

In practice what happens is that parents notice that boys brought up at home become mollycoddles, or prigs, or duffers, unable to take care of themselves. They see that boys should learn to rough it a little

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 Silas Marner by George Eliot:

But Godfrey could not bend himself to this. He felt that in letting Dunstan have the money, he had already been guilty of a breach of trust hardly less culpable than that of spending the money directly for his own behoof; and yet there was a distinction between the two acts which made him feel that the one was so much more blackening than the other as to be intolerable to him.

"I don't pretend to be a good fellow," he said to himself; "but I'm not a scoundrel--at least, I'll stop short somewhere. I'll bear the consequences of what I _have_ done sooner than make believe I've done what I never would have done. I'd never have spent the money for my own pleasure--I was tortured into it."

Silas Marner