Today's Stichomancy for Mariah Carey
The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from An International Episode by Henry James: Belgrave Square. On one side was an enormous hotel, lifting up into
the hot darkness an immense array of open, brightly lighted windows.
At the base of this populous structure was an eternal jangle of horsecars,
and all round it, in the upper dusk, was a sinister hum of mosquitoes.
The ground floor of the hotel seemed to be a huge transparent cage,
flinging a wide glare of gaslight into the street, of which it formed a sort
of public adjunct, absorbing and emitting the passersby promiscuously.
The young Englishmen went in with everyone else, from curiosity, and saw
a couple of hundred men sitting on divans along a great marble-paved corridor,
with their legs stretched out, together with several dozen more standing
in a queue, as at the ticket office of a railway station, before a
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Lobo: left side, and the kingdom of Goiama, which it bounds on the right,
forming by its windings a kind of peninsula. Then entering Bezamo,
a province of the kingdom of Damot, and Gamarchausa, part of Goiama,
it returns within a short day's journey of its spring; though to
pursue it through all its mazes, and accompany it round the kingdom
of Goiama, is a journey of twenty-nine days. So far, and a few
days' journey farther, this river confines itself to Abyssinia, and
then passes into the bordering countries of Fazulo and Ombarca.
These vast regions we have little knowledge of: they are inhabited
by nations entirely different from the Abyssins; their hair is like
that of the other blacks, short and curled. In the year 1615,
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The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: above fifty years, in an age of great intellectual activity, as well as of
political and literary transition? Certainly not Plato, whose earlier
writings are separated from his later ones by as wide an interval of
philosophical speculation as that which separates his later writings from
Aristotle.
The dialogues which have been translated in the first Appendix, and which
appear to have the next claim to genuineness among the Platonic writings,
are the Lesser Hippias, the Menexenus or Funeral Oration, the First
Alcibiades. Of these, the Lesser Hippias and the Funeral Oration are cited
by Aristotle; the first in the Metaphysics, the latter in the Rhetoric.
Neither of them are expressly attributed to Plato, but in his citation of
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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 Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: ran along the river bank, where there were rocks, and holes, and willow
trees to hide among. And all down the river bank ran a little figure.
The river was swollen by the storm full to its banks, and the willow trees
dipped their half-drowned branches into its water. Wherever there was a
gap between them, you could see it flow, red and muddy, with the stumps
upon it. But the little figure ran on and on; never looking, never
thinking; panting, panting! There, where the rocks were the thickest;
there, where on the open space the moonlight shone; there, where the
prickly pears were tangled, and the rocks cast shadows, on it ran; the
little hands clinched, the little heart beating, the eyes fixed always
ahead.
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