Today's Stichomancy for Friedrich Nietzsche

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dreams & Dust by Don Marquis:

They startle me with wordless songs To which the Sphinx hath known the rhyme.

Our hearts swell big with dead men's hates, Our eyes sting hot with dead men's tears; We are ourselves, but not ourselves, Born heirs, but serfs, to all the years!

I rode with Nimrod . . . strove at Troy . . . A slave I stood in Crowning Tyre, A queen looked on me and I loved And died to compass my desire.

THE WAGES

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac:

the two artists and was mounting the hill from which Ecouen, the steeple of Mesnil, and the forests that surround that most beautiful region, came in sight, when the gallop of a horse and the jingling of a vehicle announced the coming of Pere Leger and the grandson of Czerni-Georges, who were soon restored to their places in the coucou.

As Pierrotin drove down the narrow road to Moisselles, Georges, who had so far not ceased to talk with the farmer of the beauty of the hostess at Saint-Brice, suddenly exclaimed: "Upon my word, this landscape is not so bad, great painter, is it?"

"Pooh! you who have seen the East and Spain can't really admire it."

"I've two cigars left! If no one objects, will you help me finish

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy:

The cause of the destruction of the French army in 1812 is clear to us now. No one will deny that that cause was, on the one hand, its advance into the heart of Russia late in the season without any preparation for a winter campaign and, on the other, the character given to the war by the burning of Russian towns and the hatred of the foe this aroused among the Russian people. But no one at the time foresaw (what now seems so evident) that this was the only way an army of eight hundred thousand men- the best in the world and led by the best general- could be destroyed in conflict with a raw army of half its numerical strength, and led by inexperienced commanders as the Russian army was. Not only did no one see this, but on the Russian

War and Peace

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 Island Nights' Entertainments by Robert Louis Stevenson:

leave the good lantern to blow up with the graven images. The thing belonged to me, after all, and was worth money, and might come in handy. If I could have trusted the match, I might have run in still and rescued it. But who was going to trust the match? You know what trade is. The stuff was good enough for Kanakas to go fishing with, where they've got to look lively anyway, and the most they risk is only to have their hand blown off. But for anyone that wanted to fool around a blow-up like mine that match was rubbish.

Altogether the best I could do was to lie still, see my shot-gun handy, and wait for the explosion. But it was a solemn kind of a