Today's Stichomancy for T. E. Lawrence
| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Amazing Interlude by Mary Roberts Rinehart: and drank a great deal of water. Once or twice he found her looking at
him anxiously, but he disclaimed all illness.
He had known from the beginning what he was doing. But he did not touch
her, because in his heart he knew that where once he had been worthy he
was no longer worthy. He had left his work for a woman.
It is true that he had expected to go back at once. But the Philadelphia,
which had been listed to sail the next day, was held up by a strike in
Liverpool, and he waited on, taking such hours as she could give him,
feverishly anxious to make her happy, buying her little gifts mostly
flowers, which she wore tucked in her belt and smiled over, because she
had never before received flowers from a man.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough: the senate found their request reasonable, and ordered the general
to find some other way of new clothing the army. While he was at
a loss what course to take in this affair, the soldiers were
reduced to great distress; but Caius went from one city to
another, and by his mere representations, he prevailed with them,
that of their own accord they clothed the Roman army. This again
being reported to Rome, and seeming to be only an intimation of
what was to be expected of him as a popular leader hereafter,
raised new jealousies amongst the senators. And, besides, there
came ambassadors out of Africa from king Micipsa, to acquaint the
senate, that their master, out of respect to Caius Gracchus, had
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: up into the air of an afternoon in the nineteenth century, in a
field where the ancestors had fought, and the great-grandchildren
were peaceably ditching.
Later in the day one of the Protestant pastors was so good as to
visit me: a young man, intelligent and polite, with whom I passed
an hour or two in talk. Florac, he told me, is part Protestant,
part Catholic; and the difference in religion is usually doubled by
a difference in politics. You may judge of my surprise, coming as
I did from such a babbling purgatorial Poland of a place as
Monastier, when I learned that the population lived together on
very quiet terms; and there was even an exchange of hospitalities
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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 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: solid in their nature, like yonder table of carved oak, or that
big, square, leather-bound and brazen-clasped volume of divinity.
But, for all that, they were, in one sense, the truest and most
substantial things which the poor minister now dealt with. It is
the unspeakable misery of a life so false as his, that it steals
the pith and substance out of whatever realities there are around
us, and which were meant by Heaven to be the spirit's joy and
nutriment. To the untrue man, the whole universe is false -- it
is impalpable -- it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he
himself in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a
shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist. The only truth that
 The Scarlet Letter |
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