Today's Stichomancy for Toni Braxton

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dreams & Dust by Don Marquis:

Yes, in your faces will I smite you, gods; Coward gods and tricksters that set traps In paradise!-- Far gods that hedge yourselves about with silence And with distance; That mock men from the unscalable escarpments of your Heavens."

Thus I raved, being mad. I had no sooner finished speaking than I felt The darkness fluttered by approaching feet, And the silence was burned through by trembling

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Eryxias by Platonic Imitator:

CRITIAS: No.

SOCRATES: It is not therefore necessary that the means by which we obtain what is useful for a certain object should always be useful for the same object: for it seems that bad actions may sometimes serve good purposes? The matter will be still plainer if we look at it in this way:--If things are useful towards the several ends for which they exist, which ends would not come into existence without them, how would you regard them? Can ignorance, for instance, be useful for knowledge, or disease for health, or vice for virtue?

CRITIAS: Never.

SOCRATES: And yet we have already agreed--have we not?--that there can be

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain:

that man, I've got a kind of a salve I could put on his eyes and he could see the treasures and get them out."

So then the camel-driver was in a sweat; and he cried, and begged, and took on, and went down on his knees, and said he was just that kind of a man, and said he could fetch a thousand people that would say he wasn't ever described so exact before.

"Well, then," says the dervish, "all right. If we load the hundred camels, can I have half of them?"

The driver was so glad he couldn't hardly hold in,

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 Bucolics by Virgil:

Their pastoral ditties, will I tell the tale.

Thou, whether broad Timavus' rocky banks Thou now art passing, or dost skirt the shore Of the Illyrian main,- will ever dawn That day when I thy deeds may celebrate, Ever that day when through the whole wide world I may renown thy verse- that verse alone Of Sophoclean buskin worthy found? With thee began, to thee shall end, the strain. Take thou these songs that owe their birth to thee, And deign around thy temples to let creep