Today's Stichomancy for Douglas MacArthur
| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: But the slightest touch gives torture to those who are suff'ring.
Even dissimulation would nothing avail me at present.
Let me at once disclose what later would deepen my sorrow,
And consign me perchance to agony mute and consuming.
Let me depart forthwith! No more in this house dare I linger;
I must hence and away, and look once more for my poor friends
Whom I left in distress, when seeking to better my fortunes.
This is my firm resolve; and now I may properly tell you
That which had else been buried for many a year in my bosom.
Yes, the father's jest has wounded me deeply, I own it,
Not that I'm proud and touchy, as ill becometh a servant,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: eggs at successive periods, in different nests, and several
hens, as is stated to be the case, combined together, then
the eggs in one collection would be nearly of the same age.
If the number of eggs in one of these nests is, as I believe,
not greater on an average than the number laid by one
female in the season, then there must be as many nests as
females, and each cock bird will have its fair share of the
labour of incubation; and that during a period when the
females probably could not sit, from not having finished
laying. [15] I have before mentioned the great numbers of
huachos, or deserted eggs; so that in one day's hunting
The Voyage of the Beagle |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Dust by Mr. And Mrs. Haldeman-Julius: him not afraid, but angry. It was a shabby deal--that's what it
was--when he was so healthy and contented, only sixty-one and
ready to go on for decades--two or three at least--forced,
instead, to prepare to lay himself in a padded box and be
hurriedly packed away. It had always seemed so vague, this
business of dying, and now it was so personal--he, Martin Wade,
himself, not somebody else, would suffer a little while longer
and then grow still forever.
He would never know how sure a breeder was his new bull--the son
of that fine creature he had imported; two cows he had spotted as
not paying their board could go on for months eating good alfalfa
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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 Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac: CHAPTER III
PRELIMINARIES
Jean Francois Bernard Dumay, born at Vannes, started as a soldier for
the army of Italy in 1799. His father, president of the revolutionary
tribunal of that town, had displayed so much energy in his office that
the place had become too hot to hold the son when the parent, a
pettifogging lawyer, perished on the scaffold after the ninth
Thermidor. On the death of his mother, who died of the grief this
catastrophe occasioned, Jean sold all that he possessed and rushed to
Italy at the age of twenty-two, at the very moment when our armies
were beginning to yield. On the way he met a young man in the
Modeste Mignon |
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