Today's Stichomancy for Galileo Galilei

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche:

longing and descending!

That the lonesome height may not for ever remain lonesome and self- sufficing; that the mountains may come to the valleys and the winds of the heights to the plains:--

Oh, who could find the right prenomen and honouring name for such longing! "Bestowing virtue"--thus did Zarathustra once name the unnamable.

And then it happened also,--and verily, it happened for the first time!-- that his word blessed SELFISHNESS, the wholesome, healthy selfishness, that springeth from the powerful soul:--

--From the powerful soul, to which the high body appertaineth, the handsome, triumphing, refreshing body, around which everything becometh a

Thus Spake Zarathustra

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Lucile by Owen Meredith:

For the great crime of all my existence hath been To have known you in vain. And the duty best seen, And most hallow'd--the duty most sacred and sweet, Is that which hath led me, Lucile, to your feet. O speak! and restore me the blessing I lost When I lost you--my pearl of all pearls beyond cost! And restore to your own life its youth, and restore The vision, the rapture, the passion of yore! Ere our brows had been dimm'd in the dust of the world, When our souls their white wings yet exulting unfurl'd! For your eyes rest no more on the unquiet man,

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

had been no trips in boats, no well-fitted garments, etc., if my wife had worn some shapeless blouse, and I had seen her thus at her home, I should not have been seduced.

CHAPTER VIII.

"And note, also, this falsehood, of which all are guilty; the way in which marriages are made. What could there be more natural? The young girl is marriageable, she should marry. What simpler, provided the young person is not a monster, and men can be found with a desire to marry? Well, no, here begins a new hypocrisy.

The Kreutzer Sonata

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 Case of The Lamp That Went Out by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner:

between the bathing establishment and the customs barracks, looked around to see if he were alone and threw himself down on the sand.

He had chosen a good place. To the right and to the left were high sand dunes, before him was the broad surface of the ocean, and at his back was rising ground, bare sand with here and there a scraggly bush or a group of high thistles. Herbert Thorne believed himself to be alone here ... as far as a man can be alone over whom hangs the shadow of a crime. He groaned aloud and hid his pale face in his hands.

In his own distress he did not hear the deep sigh - which, just above him on the edge of the knoll, broke from the breast of a woman