Today's Stichomancy for Donald Rumsfeld

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp:

"whether you are in earnest or not."

"Don't you?" said Irais sweetly.

"Is it true," appealed Minora to the Man of Wrath, busy with his lemons in the background, "that your law classes women with children and idiots?"

"Certainly," he answered promptly, "and a very proper classification, too."

We all looked blank. "That's rude," said I at last.

"Truth is always rude, my dear," he replied complacently. Then he added, "If I were commissioned to draw up a new legal code, and had previously enjoyed the privilege, as I have been doing lately,

Elizabeth and her German Garden

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

chair and we'll have a chat." "I've just come from schoolSt. Regis's, you know." "So your mother saysa remarkable woman; have a cigaretteI'm sure you smoke. Well, if you're like me, you loathe all science and mathematics" Amory nodded vehemently. "Hate 'em all. Like English and history." "Of course. You'll hate school for a while, too, but I'm glad you're going to St. Regis's." "Why?" "Because it's a gentleman's school, and democracy won't hit you

This Side of Paradise

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

existence, but he is preparing for the development of his later view, that ideas were capable of relation. The fact that contradictory consequences follow from the existence or non-existence of one or many, does not prove that they have or have not existence, but rather that some different mode of conceiving them is required. Parmenides may still have thought that 'Being was,' just as Kant would have asserted the existence of 'things in themselves,' while denying the transcendental use of the Categories.

Several lesser links also connect the first and second parts of the dialogue: (1) The thesis is the same as that which Zeno has been already discussing: (2) Parmenides has intimated in the first part, that the method of Zeno should, as Socrates desired, be extended to Ideas: (3) 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 Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling:

The Fifth Great River had birth, Even as it was foretold - The Secret River of Gold! And Israel laid down His sceptre and his crown, To brood on that River bank, Where the waters flashed and sank, And burrowed in earth and fell, And bided a season below; For reason that none might know, Save only Israel.