Today's Stichomancy for Karl Marx

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James:

"Oh I've been down to London!" Waymarsh more softly moaned. "I've no use, Strether, for anything down there."

"Well," said Strether, good-humouredly, "I guess you've some use for me."

"So I've got to go?"

"Oh you've got to go further yet."

"Well," Waymarsh sighed, "do your damnedest! Only you WILL tell me before you lead me on all the way--?"

Our friend had again so lost himself, both for amusement and for contrition, in the wonder of whether he had made, in his own challenge that afternoon, such another figure, that he for an

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

What befalls thee of good it is from God; and what befalls thee of bad it is from thyself. We have sent thee to mankind as an apostle, and God sufficeth for a witness.

Whoso obeys the prophet he has obeyed God; and he who turns back- we have not sent thee to watch over them.

They say, 'Obedience!' but when they sally forth from you, a company of them brood by night over something else than that which thou hast said; but God writes down that over which they brood. Turn then from them and rely on God, for God sufficeth for a guardian. Do they not meditate on the Koran? if it were from other than God they would find in it many a discrepancy.

The Koran

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare:

Those eyes that taught all other eyes to see? 952 Now Nature cares not for thy mortal vigour Since her best work is ruin'd with thy rigour.'

Here overcome, as one full of despair, She vail'd her eyelids, who, like sluices, stopp'd 956 The crystal tide that from her two cheeks fair In the sweet channel of her bosom dropp'd But through the flood-gates breaks the silver rain, And with his strong course opens them again. 960

O! how her eyes and tears did lend and borrow; Her eyes seen in the tears, tears in her eye;

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 Jolly Corner by Henry James:

had exceptionally presented itself. He had indeed since that moment undergone an agitation so extraordinary that it might have muddled for him any earlier view; and he tried to convince himself that he might perhaps then have gone into the room and, inadvertently, automatically, on coming out, have drawn the door after him. The difficulty was that this exactly was what he never did; it was against his whole policy, as he might have said, the essence of which was to keep vistas clear. He had them from the first, as he was well aware, quite on the brain: the strange apparition, at the far end of one of them, of his baffled "prey" (which had become by so sharp an irony so little the term now to