Today's Stichomancy for Steve McQueen

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson:

elbow. Alexander is touched in a very delicate place by the disregard of Diogenes. Where was the glory of having taken Rome for these tumultuous barbarians, who poured into the Senate house, and found the Fathers sitting silent and unmoved by their success? It is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none.

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Dreams & Dust by Don Marquis:

"She will come again!" it said; And then the birds that use the vale, Broken-hearted, turned the tale Into syllables of song And chirped it half a summer long:

"Silvia, Silvia, Be our Song once more, Our vale revisit, Silvia, And be our Song once more: For joy lies sleeping in the lute; The merry pipe, the woodland flute,

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad:

second self. There he was on the other side of the bulkhead, four or five feet from us, no more, as we sat in the saloon. I looked politely at Captain Archbold (if that was his name), but it was the other I saw, in a gray sleeping suit, seated on a low stool, his bare feet close together, his arms folded, and every word said between us falling into the ears of his dark head bowed on his chest.

"I have been at sea now, man and boy, for seven-and-thirty years, and I've never heard of such a thing happening in an English ship. And that it should be my ship. Wife on board, too."

I was hardly listening to him.

The Secret Sharer

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 Miracle Mongers and Their Methods by Harry Houdini:

to be broken had been short, it would have been broken with four times less difficulty.

9. I have seen him lift a rolling stone of about 800 lib. with his hand only, standing in a frame above it, and taking hold of a chain that was fastened to it. By this I reckon that he may be almost as strong again as those who are generally reckoned as the strongest men, they generally lifting no more than 400 lib. in that manner. The weakest men who are in

Miracle Mongers and Their Methods