Today's Stichomancy for Tom Leykis

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx:

offers to them the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement.

Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new social laws, that are to create these conditions.

Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive

The Communist Manifesto

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall:

in expression than the lines themselves, however much further he may have gone in idea. That he believed them to exist at all times round a magnet, and irrespective of the existence of magnetic matter, such as iron filings, external to the magnet, is certain. No doubt the space round every magnet presented itself to his imagination as traversed by loops of magnetic power; but he was chary in speaking of the physical substratum of those loops. Indeed it may be doubted whether the physical theory of lines of force presented itself with any distinctness to his own mind. The possible complicity of the luminiferous ether in magnetic phenomena was certainly in his thoughts. 'How the magnetic force,' he writes,

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

this, and if self-control is the true secret of happiness, then the paradox is true that the only use of rhetoric is in self-accusation, and Polus was right in saying that to do wrong is worse than to suffer wrong, and Gorgias was right in saying that the rhetorician must be a just man. And you were wrong in taunting me with my defenceless condition, and in saying that I might be accused or put to death or boxed on the ears with impunity. For I may repeat once more, that to strike is worse than to be stricken--to do than to suffer. What I said then is now made fast in adamantine bonds. I myself know not the true nature of these things, but I know that no one can deny my words and not be ridiculous. To do wrong is the greatest of evils, and to suffer wrong is the next greatest evil. He who would avoid the last

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 Cavalry General by Xenophon:

attention to the horses' feet, and see that they will stand being ridden over rough ground. A horse, one knows, is practically useless where he cannot be galloped without suffering.

[5] Lit. "in process of being raised."

[6] Or, "to press home a charge a l'outrance, or retire from the field unscathed."

And now, supposing that your horses are all that they ought to be, like pains must be applied to train the men themselves. The trooper, in the first place, must be able to spring on horseback easily--a feat to which many a man has owed his life ere now. And next, he must be able to ride with freedom over every sort of ground, since any