Today's Stichomancy for Voltaire

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain:

and this suggestion spiked his battery.

We drove sullenly through Brienz, dead to the seductions of its bewildering array of Swiss carvings and the clamorous HOO-hooing of its cuckoo clocks, and had not entirely recovered our spirits when we rattled across a bridge over the rushing blue river and entered the pretty town of Interlaken. It was just about sunset, and we had made the trip from Lucerne in ten hours.

CHAPTER XXXII [The Jungfrau, the Bride, and the Piano]

We located ourselves at the Jungfrau Hotel, one of those

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War by Frederick A. Talbot:

against aerial observation. One of the foremost authorities upon military aviation only a few months ago urged the German Military Staff to encourage the planting of orchards, not for the purpose of benefiting agriculture or in the interests of the farmers, but merely for military exigencies.

He pointed to the extensive orchards which exist in Alsace-Lorraine and Baden, the military covering value of which he had determined from personal experience, having conducted aerial operations while military were moving to and fro under the cover of the trees. He declared that the cover was efficient and that under the circumstances the laying out of extensive orchards

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov:

monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without good works. A man does not need six feet of earth or a farm, but the whole globe, all nature, where he can have room to display all the qualities and peculiarities of his free spirit.

"My brother Nikolay, sitting in his government office, dreamed of how he would eat his own cabbages, which would fill the whole yard with such a savoury smell, take his meals on the green grass, sleep in the sun, sit for whole hours on the seat by the gate gazing at the fields and the forest. Gardening books and the agricultural hints in calendars were his delight, his favourite spiritual sustenance; he enjoyed reading newspapers, too, but the

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 Voice of the City by O. Henry:

THE COMPLETE LIFE OF JOHN HOPKINS

There is a saying that no man has tasted the full flavor of life until he has known poverty, love and war. The justness of this reflection commends it to the lover of condensed philosophy. The three condi- tions embrace about all there is in life worth knowing. A surface thinker might deem that wealth should be added to the list. Not so. When a poor man finds a long-bidden quarter-dollar that has slipped through a rip into his vest lining, be sounds the pleasure of life with a deeper plummet than any millionaire can

The Voice of the City