Today's Stichomancy for Howard Stern

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

Chews the pale herbage, or some heifer tracks Amid the crowding herd. Now close, ye Nymphs, Ye Nymphs of Dicte, close the forest-glades, If haply there may chance upon mine eyes The white bull's wandering foot-prints: him belike Following the herd, or by green pasture lured, Some kine may guide to the Gortynian stalls. Then sings he of the maid so wonder-struck With the apples of the Hesperids, and then With moss-bound, bitter bark rings round the forms Of Phaethon's fair sisters, from the ground

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau:

responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to nature, it dies; and so a man.

The night in prison was novel and interesting enough. The prisoners in their shirtsleeves were enjoying a chat and the evening air in the doorway, when I entered. But the

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Paradise Lost by John Milton:

And light from darkness by the hemisphere Divided: light the Day, and darkness Night, He named. Thus was the first day even and morn: Nor past uncelebrated, nor unsung By the celestial quires, when orient light Exhaling first from darkness they beheld; Birth-day of Heaven and Earth; with joy and shout The hollow universal orb they filled, And touched their golden harps, and hymning praised God and his works; Creator him they sung, Both when first evening was, and when first morn.

Paradise Lost

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 Christ in Flanders by Honore de Balzac:

and laws have made it; and at this end there was terror and wailing, innumerable different impulses all repressed by hideous doubts--at this end, and at this only, the agony of fear.

Above all these human lives stood a strong man, the skipper; no doubts assailed him, the chief, the king, the fatalist among them. He was trusting in himself rather than in Providence, crying, "Bail away!" instead of "Holy Virgin," defying the storm, in fact, and struggling with the sea like a wrestler.

But the helpless poor at the other end of the wherry! The mother rocking on her bosom the little one who smiled at the storm; the woman once so frivolous and gay, and now tormented with bitter remorse; the