Today's Stichomancy for Italo Calvino

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche:

with unbridled presumption, to recommend the Germans to the interest of Europe as gentle, goodhearted, weak-willed, and poetical fools. Finally, let us only understand profoundly enough Napoleon's astonishment when he saw Goethe it reveals what had been regarded for centuries as the "German spirit" "VOILA UN HOMME!"--that was as much as to say "But this is a MAN! And I only expected to see a German!"

Supposing, then, that in the picture of the philosophers of the future, some trait suggests the question whether they must not perhaps be skeptics in the last-mentioned sense, something in them would only be designated thereby--and not they themselves.

Beyond Good and Evil

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Chinese Boy and Girl by Isaac Taylor Headland:

parents happen to be engaged in. Indeed, in addition to the games common to a larger part of the country, there are many which are local, and depend upon the employment of the parents or the people. THE TOYS CHILDREN PLAY WITH One day while sitting at table, with our little girl, nineteen months old, on her mother's knee near by, we picked up her rubber doll and began to whip it violently. The child

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Ursula by Honore de Balzac:

The abbe departed; presently he turned back to look at Minoret. The man was holding his head in his hands as if it troubled him; he was, in fact, partly crazy. In the first place, he had kept the three certificates because he did not know what to do with them. He dared not draw the money himself for fear it should be noticed; he did not wish to sell them, and was still trying to find some way of transferring the certificates. In this horrible state of uncertainty he bethought him of acknowledging all to his wife and getting her advice. Zelie, who always managed affairs for him so well, she could get him out of his troubles. The three-per-cent Funds were now selling at eighty. Restitution! why, that meant, with arrearages, giving up a

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 Waste Land by T. S. Eliot:

Where all shall see her naked skin . . .

199. I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken: it was reported to me from Sydney, Australia.

202. _V._ Verlaine, PARSIFAL.

210. The currants were quoted at a price 'carriage and insurance free to London'; and the Bill of Lading, etc., were to be handed to the buyer upon payment of the sight draft.

Notes 196 and 197 were transposed in this and the Hogarth Press edition, but have been corrected here.

210. 'Carriage and insurance free'] 'cost, insurance and freight'--Editor.

218. Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a 'character',

The Waste Land