Today's Stichomancy for Ringo Starr
| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from In Darkest England and The Way Out by General William Booth: appetite, hunger. Here is a man who has been at a religious meeting,
or received some good advice, or, perhaps, just come out of prison,
with the memories of the hardships he has suffered fresh upon him, or
the advice of the chaplain ringing in his ears. He has made up his
mind to steal no more, but he has no means of earning a livelihood.
He becomes hungry. What is he to do? A loaf of bread tempts him, or,
more likely, a gold chain which he can turn into bread. An inward
struggle commences, he tries to stick to his bargain, but the hunger
goes on gnawing within, and it may be there is a wife and children
hungry as well as himself; so he yields to the temptation, takes the
chain, and in turn the policeman takes him.
 In Darkest England and The Way Out |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: from the air at midday. When they came to the high yellow wall,
where the lane turned off from the road, Helen was for dismissing
the two young men.
"You've come far enough," she said. "Go back to bed."
But they seemed unwilling to move.
"Let's sit down a moment," said Hewet. He spread his coat on
the ground. "Let's sit down and consider." They sat down and looked
out over the bay; it was very still, the sea was rippling faintly,
and lines of green and blue were beginning to stripe it. There were
no sailing boats as yet, but a steamer was anchored in the bay,
looking very ghostly in the mist; it gave one unearthly cry,
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: greatly admired from the summit of the hill above the town. Painted
entirely red, this inn produced a most piquant effect in the
landscape, whether by detaching itself from the general background of
the town, or by contrasting its scarlet sides with the verdure of the
surrounding foliage, and the gray-blue tints of the water. This house
owed its name, the Red Inn, to this external decoration, imposed upon
it, no doubt from time immemorial by the caprice of its founder. A
mercantile superstition, natural enough to the different possessors of
the building, far-famed among the sailors of the Rhine, had made them
scrupulous to preserve the title.
Hearing the sound of horses' hoofs, the master of the Red Inn came out
|
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 An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: one feels in a silent forest. All of a sudden, we came round a
corner, and there, in a little green round the church, was a bevy
of girls in Parisian costumes playing croquet. Their laughter, and
the hollow sound of ball and mallet, made a cheery stir in the
neighbourhood; and the look of these slim figures, all corseted and
ribboned, produced an answerable disturbance in our hearts. We
were within sniff of Paris, it seemed. And here were females of
our own species playing croquet, just as if Precy had been a place
in real life, instead of a stage in the fairyland of travel. For,
to be frank, the peasant woman is scarcely to be counted as a woman
at all, and after having passed by such a succession of people in
|
|
|