Today's Stichomancy for Federico Fellini

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac:

she would not be separated from her husband even if she were ten times as unhappy, and talked no more about her sorrows. After being overwhelmed by her parents with all the little wordless and consoling kindnesses by which the old couple tried in vain to make up to her for her distress of heart, Augustine went away, feeling the impossibility of making a superior mind intelligible to weak intellects. She had learned that a wife must hide from every one, even from her parents, woes for which it is so difficult to find sympathy. The storms and sufferings of the upper spheres are appreciated only by the lofty spirits who inhabit there. In any circumstance we can only be judged by our equals.

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Pupil by Henry James:

they came back another year for a longer stay, the general character of which in Pemberton's memory to-day mixes pitiably and confusedly with that of the first. He sees Morgan's shabby knickerbockers - the everlasting pair that didn't match his blouse and that as he grew longer could only grow faded. He remembers the particular holes in his three or four pair of coloured stockings.

Morgan was dear to his mother, but he never was better dressed than was absolutely necessary - partly, no doubt, by his own fault, for he was as indifferent to his appearance as a German philosopher. "My dear fellow, you ARE coming to pieces," Pemberton would say to him in sceptical remonstrance; to which the child would reply,

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Three Taverns by Edwin Arlington Robinson:

Of his infrequent forced endurance of it; And having had no pleasure, paid no more For needless immolation, or for the sight Of those who heard what he was never to hear. To see them listening was itself enough To make him suffer; and to watch worn eyes, On other days, of strangers who forgot Their sorrows and their failures and themselves Before a few mysterious odds and ends Of marble carted from the Parthenon -- And all for seeing what he was never to see,

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 Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) by Dante Alighieri:

To me: "Art thou, too, of the other fools?

Here pity lives when it is wholly dead; Who is a greater reprobate than he Who feels compassion at the doom divine?

Lift up, lift up thy head, and see for whom Opened the earth before the Thebans' eyes; Wherefore they all cried: 'Whither rushest thou,

Amphiaraus? Why dost leave the war?' And downward ceased he not to fall amain As far as Minos, who lays hold on all.

See, he has made a bosom of his shoulders!

The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)