Today's Stichomancy for Mel Brooks
| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: Eno's fruit salt, which, by sheer brass and notoriety, and
the most disgusting pictures I ever remember to have seen,
has overlaid that comforter of my childhood, Lamplough's
pyretic saline. Lamplough was genteel, Eno was omnipresent;
Lamplough was trite, Eno original and abominably vulgar; and
here have I, a man of some pretensions to knowledge of the
world, contented myself with half a sheet of note-paper, a
few cold words which do not directly address the imagination,
and the adornment (if adornment it may be called) of four red
wafers! Am I, then, to sink with Lamplough, or to soar with
Eno? Am I to adopt that modesty which is doubtless becoming
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Bride of Lammermoor by Walter Scott: us a page of talk for every single idea which two words might
have communicated, while the posture, and manner, and incident,
accurately drawn, and brougth out by appropriate colouring, would
have preserved all that was worthy of preservation, and saved
these everlasting 'said he's' and 'said she's,' with which it has
been your pleasure to encumber your pages."
I replied, "That he confounded the operations of the pencil and
the pen; that the serene and silent art, as painting has been
called by one of our first living poets, necessarily appealed to
the eye, because it had not the organs for addressing the ear;
whereas poetry, or that species of composition which approached
The Bride of Lammermoor |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: round to-day to all your pupils and tell them that you are ill; is it
not so? And then you can spend the nights with our lamb, and sleep of
a morning from five o'clock till, let us say, two in the afternoon. I
myself will take the day, the most tiring part, for there is your
breakfast and dinner to get ready, and the bed to make, and the things
to change, and the doses of medicine to give. I could not hold out for
another ten days at this rate. What would become of you if I were to
fall ill? And you yourself, it makes one shudder to see you; just look
at yourself, after sitting up with him last night!"
She drew Schmucke to the glass, and Schmucke thought that there was a
great change.
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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 The Underground City by Jules Verne: of old Aberfoyle; they were now driven to seek the means
of subsistence elsewhere, and they waited sadly to bid farewell
to the engineer.
James Starr stood upright, at the door of the vast shed in which he had
for so many years superintended the powerful machines of the shaft.
Simon Ford, the foreman of the Dochart pit, then fifty-five years of age,
and other managers and overseers, surrounded him. James Starr took
off his hat. The miners, cap in hand, kept a profound silence.
This farewell scene was of a touching character, not wanting in grandeur.
"My friends," said the engineer, "the time has come for us to separate.
The Aberfoyle mines, which for so many years have united us
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