Today's Stichomancy for John Wilkes Booth
| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Drama on the Seashore by Honore de Balzac: earthenware jug. Never had my imagination, when it carried me to the
deserts where early Christian anchorites spent their lives, depicted
to my mind a form more grandly religious nor more horribly repentant
than that of this man. You, who have a life-long experience of the
confessional, dear uncle, you may never, perhaps, have seen so awful a
remorse,--remorse sunk in the waves of prayer, the ceaseless
supplication of a mute despair. This fisherman, this mariner, this
hard, coarse Breton, was sublime through some hidden emotion. Had
those eyes wept? That hand, moulded for an unwrought statue, had it
struck? That ragged brow, where savage honor was imprinted, and on
which strength had left vestiges of the gentleness which is an
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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 Human Drift by Jack London: leave it to any one: a boat would never act that way.
We have some history north of the Bay. Nearly three centuries and
a half ago, that doughty pirate and explorer, Sir Francis Drake,
combing the Pacific for Spanish galleons, anchored in the bight
formed by Point Reyes, on which to-day is one of the richest dairy
regions in the world. Here, less than two decades after Drake,
Sebastien Carmenon piled up on the rocks with a silk-laden galleon
from the Philippines. And in this same bay of Drake, long
afterward, the Russian fur-poachers rendezvous'd their bidarkas
and stole in through the Golden Gate to the forbidden waters of
San Francisco Bay.
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner: He knelt down with his face upon the ground, and he folded his hands upon
his curls. The fierce sun poured down its heat upon his head and upon his
altar. When he looked up he knew what he should see--the glory of God!
For fear his very heart stood still, his breath came heavily; he was half
suffocated. He dared not look up. Then at last he raised himself. Above
him was the quiet blue sky, about him the red earth; there were the clumps
of silent ewes and his altar--that was all.
He looked up--nothing broke the intense stillness of the blue overhead. He
looked round in astonishment, then he bowed again, and this time longer
than before.
When he raised himself the second time all was unaltered. Only the sun had
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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 The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: diseases, diseases of middle life, and of old age; the thought
that we shall grow old, lose our faculties, and again become
childlike; while crowning all is the fear of death. Then there
is a long line of particular tears and trouble-bearing
expectations, such, for example, as ideas associated with certain
articles of food, the dread of the east wind, the terrors of hot
weather, the aches and pains associated with cold weather, the
fear of catching cold if one sits in a draught, the coming of
hay-fever upon the 14th of August in the middle of the day, and
so on through a long list of fears, dreads, worriments,
anxieties, anticipations, expectations, pessimisms, morbidities,
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