Today's Stichomancy for Mao Zedong

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell:

the table, folding their voluminous petticoats in pads under their knees, so they would ache less from contact with the hard floor. Carreen, who was small for her age, could not kneel comfortably at the table and so knelt facing a chair, her elbows on the seat. She liked this position, for she seldom failed to go to sleep during prayers and, in this postures it escaped her mother's notice.

The house servants shuffled and rustled in the hall to kneel by the doorway, Mammy groaning aloud as she sank down, Pork straight as a ramrod, Rosa and Teena, the maids, graceful in their spreading bright calicoes, Cookie gaunt and yellow beneath her

Gone With the Wind

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from New Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Bright and confident and true, And my old love comes to meet me in the dawning and the dew.

LOVE, WHAT IS LOVE?

LOVE - what is love? A great and aching heart; Wrung hands; and silence; and a long despair. Life - what is life? Upon a moorland bare To see love coming and see love depart.

SOON OUR FRIENDS PERISH

SOON our friends perish, Soon all we cherish Fades as days darken - goes as flowers go.

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle:

assistant answered it. We have had some skirmishes, but we had never set eyes upon each other before. I hardly looked at his face. His knees were what I wished to see. You must yourself have remarked how worn, wrinkled, and stained they were. They spoke of those hours of burrowing. The only remaining point was what they were burrowing for. I walked round the corner, saw the City and Suburban Bank abutted on our friend's premises, and felt that I had solved my problem. When you drove home after the concert I called upon Scotland Yard and upon the chairman of the bank directors, with the result that you have seen."

"And how could you tell that they would make their attempt

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

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 Child of Storm by H. Rider Haggard:

So it came about that once again Fate dragged me into the Zulu maelstrom.

On the morrow I was summoned to the trial, half as a witness and half as one of the offenders. Going to the head of the Nodwengu kraal, where Panda was sitting in state with his Council, I found the whole great space in front of him crowded with a dense concourse of fierce-faced partisans, those who favoured Cetewayo--the Usutu--sitting on the right, and those who favoured Umbelazi--the Isigqosa--sitting on the left. At the head of the right-hand section sat Cetewayo, his brethren and chief men. At the head of the left-hand section sat Umbelazi, his brethren and his chief men, amongst whom I saw Saduko take a place immediately

Child of Storm