Today's Stichomancy for Niccolo Machiavelli

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Flame and Shadow by Sara Teasdale:

Eight O'Clock

Supper comes at five o'clock, At six, the evening star, My lover comes at eight o'clock -- But eight o'clock is far.

How could I bear my pain all day Unless I watched to see The clock-hands laboring to bring Eight o'clock to me.

Lost Things

Oh, I could let the world go by,

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

common to both of them (Phil. Gorg.); there is also a common tendency in them to take up arms against pleasure, although the view of the Philebus, which is probably the later of the two dialogues, is the more moderate. There seems to be an allusion to the passage in the Gorgias, in which Socrates dilates on the pleasures of itching and scratching. Nor is there any real discrepancy in the manner in which Gorgias and his art are spoken of in the two dialogues. For Socrates is far from implying that the art of rhetoric has a real sphere of practical usefulness: he only means that the refutation of the claims of Gorgias is not necessary for his present purpose. He is saying in effect: 'Admit, if you please, that rhetoric is the greatest and usefullest of sciences:--this does not prove that

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum:

the tops of many magnificent trees, some nearly as tall as the spires of the buildings, and the Shaggy Man told them that these trees were in the royal gardens of Princess Ozma.

They stood a long time on the hilltop, feasting their eyes on the splendor of the Emerald City.

"Whee!" exclaimed Scraps, clasping her padded hands in ecstacy, "that'll do for me to live in, all right. No more of the Munchkin Country for these patches--and no more of the Crooked Magician!"

The Patchwork Girl of Oz

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 Night and Day by Virginia Woolf:

the house in which she stood; she heard the soft domestic sounds of regular existence upon staircases and floors above her head, and movements through the wall in the house next door. She had no very clear vision of Denham himself, when she lifted the telephone to her lips and replied that she thought Saturday would suit her. She hoped that he would not say good-bye at once, although she felt no particular anxiety to attend to what he was saying, and began, even while he spoke, to think of her own upper room, with its books, its papers pressed between the leaves of dictionaries, and the table that could be cleared for work. She replaced the instrument, thoughtfully; her restlessness was assuaged; she finished her letter to Cassandra