Today's Stichomancy for Akira Kurosawa

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Distinguished Provincial at Paris by Honore de Balzac:

and if it suits me, we might come to terms that very day."

Seeing his acquaintance so easy, Lucien was inspired with the unlucky idea of bringing the Marguerites upon the scene.

"I have a volume of poetry as well, sir----" he began.

"Oh! you are a poet! Then I don't want your romance," and the old man handed back the manuscript. "The rhyming fellows come to grief when they try their hands at prose. In prose you can't use words that mean nothing; you absolutely must say something."

"But Sir Walter Scott, sir, wrote poetry as well as----"

"That is true," said Doguereau, relenting. He guessed that the young fellow before him was poor, and kept the manuscript. "Where do you

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling:

'Then I saw - then, they say, she had to brace back same as if she was wadin' in tide-water; for the Pharisees just about flowed past her - down the beach to the boat, I dunnamany of 'em - with their wives an' childern an' valooables, all escapin' out of cruel Old England. Silver you could hear chinkin', an' liddle bundles hove down dunt on the bottom-boards, an' passels o' liddle swords an' shields raklin', an' liddle fingers an' toes scratchin' on the boatside to board her when the two sons pushed her off. That boat she sunk lower an' lower, but all the Widow could see in it was her boys movin' hampered-

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson:

digger plied his instrument. As we neared the top of the ascent, a bird or two winged aloft and hovered darkly in the moonlight; and the next moment we were gazing through a fringe of trees upon a singular picture.

A narrow plateau, overlooked by the white mountains, and encompassed nearer hand by woods, lay bare to the strong radiance of the moon. Rough goods, such as make the wealth of foresters, were sprinkled here and there upon the ground in meaningless disarray. About the midst, a tent stood, silvered with frost: the door open, gaping on the black interior. At the one end of this small stage lay what seemed the tattered remnants of a man.

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 Pathology of Lying, Etc. by William and Mary Healy:

besides having been returned once after an escape. When she was 6 or 7 years of age she began thieving. She took things from her mother's trunk and pawned them. The child stole from the people's rooms where her mother worked as janitress. Later she was truant and associated with immoral girls. In Chicago she stole a bracelet and a ring from a down-town store, wearing the bracelet later. She took $15 from a neighbor's house. She went to saloons in company with an immoral woman, and at least on one occasion she had been drinking. At 12 or 13 she was known to be ``crazy about boys,'' but probably was not immoral then. The mother insists that the girl, resembling her father in this, is