Today's Stichomancy for Sergio Leone

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Tono Bungay by H. G. Wells:

withour last year's trousers and a hat, and swap 'em off for a pot ofgeraniums. See? We'd do it through Business Organisations, and there you are! See? Capern's Patent Filament!

The Ideal and the Real! George, we'll do it! We'll bring it off! And then we'll give such a facer to Boom, he'll think for fifty years. He's laying up for our London and African meeting. Let him. He can turn the whole paper on to us. He says the Business Organisations shares aren't worth fifty-two and we quote 'em at eighty-four. Well, here we are gettin' ready for him--loading our gun."

His pose was triumphant.

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

And in gentle cloudlets chase; To the vineleaf's safe retreat

Drives the insects' happy race,

Cools these burning cheeks of mine,

Checks the sun's fierce glow Adam, Kisses, as he flies, the vine,

Flaunting over hill and plain.

And his whispers soft convey

Thousand greetings from my friend; Ere these hills own night's dark sway,

Kisses greet me, without end.

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from In the Cage by Henry James:

on Thursday, and on Thursday that of their ordering minced kidneys on Saturday. He had moreover a constant gift of inexorable enquiry as to where and what they should have gone and have done if they hadn't been exactly as they were. He had in short his resources, and his mistress had never been so conscious of them; on the other hand they never interfered so little with her own. She liked to be as she was--if it could only have lasted. She could accept even without bitterness a rigour of economy so great that the little fee they paid for admission to the pier had to be balanced against other delights. The people at Ladle's and at Thrupp's had THEIR ways of amusing themselves, whereas she had to sit and hear Mr.

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 Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf:

after watching them all for a time in silence, began to ask Rachel kindly questions--When did they all go back? Oh, they expected her father. She must want to see her father--there would be a great deal to tell him, and (she looked sympathetically at Terence) he would be so happy, she felt sure. Years ago, she continued, it might have been ten or twenty years ago, she remembered meeting Mr. Vinrace at a party, and, being so much struck by his face, which was so unlike the ordinary face one sees at a party, that she had asked who he was, and she was told that it was Mr. Vinrace, and she had always remembered the name,--an uncommon name,--and he had a lady with him, a very sweet-looking woman, but it was one of