Today's Stichomancy for Sidney Poitier
| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: deviation to the One Centre, there to enter his eternal life,--to
receive there, in his faculties and in his essence, the power to enjoy
through Love, and the gift of comprehending through Wisdom.
The scene which suddenly unveiled itself to the eyes of the two Seers
crushed them with a sense of its vastness; they felt like atoms, whose
minuteness was not to be compared even to the smallest particle which
the infinite of divisibility enabled the mind of man to imagine,
brought into the presence of the infinite of Numbers, which God alone
can comprehend as He alone can comprehend Himself.
Strength and Love! what heights, what depths in those two entities,
whom the Seraph's first prayer placed like two links, as it were, to
 Seraphita |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Vicar of Tours by Honore de Balzac: lean, was yellow and bilious, while the vicar was what we call,
familiarly, plump. Birotteau's face, round and ruddy, proclaimed a
kindly nature barren of ideas, while that of the Abbe Troubert, long
and ploughed by many wrinkles, took on at times an expression of
sarcasm, or else of contempt; but it was necessary to watch him very
closely before those sentiments could be detected. The canon's
habitual condition was perfect calmness, and his eyelids were usually
lowered over his orange-colored eyes, which could, however, give clear
and piercing glances when he liked. Reddish hair added to the gloomy
effect of this countenance, which was always obscured by the veil
which deep meditation drew across its features. Many persons at first
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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 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: be forgotten, and be it observed in passing, that Col. Bernard, the same
President of the Military Committee, who, under Cavaignac, helped to
deport 15,000 insurgents without trial, moves at this period again at
the head of the Military Committees now active in Paris.
Although the honest, the pure republicans built with the state of siege
the nursery in which the Praetorian guards of December 2, 1851, were to
be reared, they, on the other hand, deserve praise in that, instead of
exaggerating the feeling of patriotism, as under Louis Philippe, now;
they themselves are in command of the national power, they crawl before
foreign powers; instead of making Italy free, they allow her to be
reconquered by Austrians and Neapolitans. The election of Louis
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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 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: bring it into the world. Its gladiators found in the stern classic
traditions of the Roman republic the ideals and the form, the
self-deceptions, that they needed in order to conceal from themselves
the narrow bourgeois substance of their own struggles, and to keep their
passion up to the height of a great historic tragedy. Thus, at another
stage of development a century before, did Cromwell and the English
people draw from the Old Testament the language, passions and illusions
for their own bourgeois revolution. When the real goal was reached,
when the remodeling of English society was accomplished, Locke
supplanted Habakuk.
Accordingly, the reviving of the dead in those revolutions served the
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