Today's Stichomancy for Ray Bradbury
| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: Show us this person; let us hear him. (If they listen to the
silences within, presently they will hear him.) But when one
argues, one finds oneself suddenly in the net of those ancient
controversies between species and individual, between the one and
the many, which arise out of the necessarily imperfect methods of
the human mind. Upon these matters there has been much pregnant
writing during the last half century. Such ideas as this writer has
to offer are to be found in a previous little book of his, "First
and Last Things," in which, writing as one without authority or
specialisation in logic and philosophy, as an ordinary man vividly
interested, for others in a like case, he was at some pains to
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: astonishingly clear and piercing, at another full of heavenly
sweetness, those eyes became dull, almost colorless, as it seemed,
when he was lost in meditation. They then looked like a window from
which the sun had suddenly vanished after lighting it up. His strength
and his voice were no less variable; equally rigid, equally
unexpected. His tone could be as sweet as that of a woman compelled to
own her love; at other times it was labored, rough, rugged, if I may
use such words in a new sense. As to his strength, he was habitually
incapable of enduring the fatigue of any game, and seemed weakly,
almost infirm. But during the early days of his school-life, one of
our little bullies having made game of this sickliness, which rendered
 Louis Lambert |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: I have been known for three and forty years--Frederick Douglass.
Mr. Johnson had just been reading the "Lady of the Lake,"
and so pleased was he with its great character that he wished me
to bear his name. Since reading that charming poem myself,
I have often thought that, considering the noble hospitality
and manly character of Nathan Johnson--black man though he was--he,
far more than I, illustrated the virtues of the Douglas of Scotland.
Sure am I that, if any slave-catcher had entered his domicile
with a view to my recapture, Johnson would have shown himself like him
of the "stalwart hand."
The reader may be surprised at the impressions I had in some way conceived
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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 Parmenides by Plato: meaning of one has been reduced to a point, there is no use in saying that
it has neither parts nor magnitude. Thirdly, The conception of the same
is, first of all, identified with the one; and then by a further analysis
distinguished from, and even opposed to it. Fourthly, We may detect
notions, which have reappeared in modern philosophy, e.g. the bare
abstraction of undefined unity, answering to the Hegelian 'Seyn,' or the
identity of contradictions 'that which is older is also younger,' etc., or
the Kantian conception of an a priori synthetical proposition 'one is.'
II. In the first series of propositions the word 'is' is really the
copula; in the second, the verb of existence. As in the first series, the
negative consequence followed from one being affirmed to be equivalent to
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