Today's Stichomancy for Moby

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac:

ministers on his death-bed, blaming himself for having taken the emoluments of an office of which Rabourdin did all the work; he felt remorse of conscience, and the ministers, to quiet him, promised to appoint Rabourdin unless higher powers intervened."

Bixiou. "Gentlemen, are you all against me? seven to one,--for I know which side you'll take, Monsieur Phellion. Well, I'll bet a dinner costing five hundred francs at the Rocher de Cancale that Rabourdin does not get La Billardiere's place. That will cost you only a hundred francs each, and I'm risking five hundred,--five to one against me! Do you take it up?" [Shouting into the next room.] "Du Bruel, what say you?"

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

I doe not set my life at a pins fee; And for my Soule, what can it doe to that? Being a thing immortall as it selfe: It waues me forth againe; Ile follow it

Hor. What if it tempt you toward the Floud my Lord? Or to the dreadfull Sonnet of the Cliffe, That beetles o're his base into the Sea, And there assumes some other horrible forme, Which might depriue your Soueraignty of Reason, And draw you into madnesse thinke of it? Ham. It wafts me still: goe on, Ile follow thee

Hamlet

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson:

which not only spared her embarrassment, but set the last consecration on her now articulate love.

Into the wine-shop there came a French gentleman, arrayed in the last refinement of the fashion, though a little tumbled by his passage in the wind. It was to be judged he had come from the same formal gathering at which the others had preceded him; and perhaps that he had gone there in the hope to meet with them, for he came up to Ballantrae with unceremonious eagerness.

'At last, here you are!' he cried in French. 'I thought I was to miss you altogether.'

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 Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson:

the visible world; it quails before so vast an outlook, it is tortured by distance; yet there is no rest or shelter till the man runs into his cabin, and can repose his sight upon things near at hand. Hence, I am told, a sickness of the vision peculiar to these empty plains.

Yet perhaps with sunflowers and cicadae, summer and winter, cattle, wife and family, the settler may create a full and various existence. One person at least I saw upon the plains who seemed in every way superior to her lot. This was a woman who boarded us at a way station, selling milk. She was largely formed; her features were more than comely; she had that great rarity - a fine