Today's Stichomancy for Alec Guinness

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Blix by Frank Norris:

was not in reality silent. At times when they listened intently, especially when they closed their eyes, there came to them a subdued, steady bourdon, profound, unceasing, a vast, numb murmur, like no other sound in all the gamut of nature--the sound of a city at night, the hum of a great, conglomerate life, wrought out there from moment to moment under the stars and under the moon, while the last hours of the old year dropped quietly away. A star fell. Sitting in the window, the two noticed it at once, and Condy

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske:

an effort of the imagination, on the other hand they are sufficiently remote for us to study them without passionate and warping prejudice. The contest between Catholicism and the reformed religion--between ecclesiastical autocracy and the right of private investigation--has become a thing of the past, and constitutes a closed chapter in human history. The epoch which begins where Mr. Motley's history is designed to close--at the peace of Westphalia--is far more complicated. Since the middle of the seventeenth century a double movement has been going on in religion and philosophy, society and politics,--a movement of destruction typified by Voltaire and Rousseau, and a constructive

The Unseen World and Other Essays

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato:

you, in your simplicity, may be inclined to mock; there are two lines in the apocryphal writings of Homer in which the name occurs. One of them is rather outrageous, and not altogether metrical. They are as follows:

'Mortals call him fluttering love, But the immortals call him winged one, Because the growing of wings (Or, reading pterothoiton, 'the movement of wings.') is a necessity to him.'

You may believe this, but not unless you like. At any rate the loves of lovers and their causes are such as I have described.

Now the lover who is taken to be the attendant of Zeus is better able to bear the winged god, and can endure a heavier burden; but the attendants

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 Chinese Boy and Girl by Isaac Taylor Headland:

seventy degrees. He set the bowl whirling on the end of the chop-stick, rested one tooth on the other, in the indentation and they whirled like a brace and bit. Finally he took a spiral wire having a straight point on each end. This he called a dead dragon. He set the bowl whirling on one end, placing the other on the small frame already referred to. As the spiral wire began to turn as though boring, he called it a living dragon. These feats of balancing excited much wonder and merriment on the part of the children.