Today's Stichomancy for Tom Cruise

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Georgics by Virgil:

But those, whose vigilance no care escapes, Search for a kindred site, where first to rear A nursery for the trees, and eke whereto Soon to translate them, lest the sudden shock From their new mother the young plants estrange. Nay, even the quarter of the sky they brand Upon the bark, that each may be restored, As erst it stood, here bore the southern heats, Here turned its shoulder to the northern pole; So strong is custom formed in early years. Whether on hill or plain 'tis best to plant

Georgics

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Vicar of Tours by Honore de Balzac:

brightened by the pleasures of good living and devoid of serious ideas, with a veil which simulated thought. It was but the skeleton of the old Birotteau who had rolled only one year earlier so vacuous but so content along the Cloister. The bishop cast one look of pity and contempt upon his victim; then he consented to forget him, and went his way.

There is no doubt that Troubert would have been in other times a Hildebrand or an Alexander the Sixth. In these days the Church is no longer a political power, and does not absorb the whole strength of her solitaries. Celibacy, however, presents the inherent vice of concentating the faculties of man upon a single passion, egotism,

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato:

former state of existence. His mission was to realize the abstract; in that, all good and truth, all the hopes of this and another life seemed to centre. To him abstractions, as we call them, were another kind of knowledge--an inner and unseen world, which seemed to exist far more truly than the fleeting objects of sense which were without him. When we are once able to imagine the intense power which abstract ideas exercised over the mind of Plato, we see that there was no more difficulty to him in realizing the eternal existence of them and of the human minds which were associated with them, in the past and future than in the present. The difficulty was not how they could exist, but how they could fail to exist. In the attempt to regain this 'saving' knowledge of the ideas, the sense

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 Cavalry General by Xenophon:

older men you cannot do better than accustom them to mount, or rather to be hoisted up by aid of some one, Persian fashion.[25]

[24] Like Pheidon, in the fragment of Mnesimachus's play "The Breeder of Horses," ap. Athen. See Courier, ib. p. 55.

[25] See "Anab." IV. iv. 4; "Horsemanship," vi. 12.

With a view to keeping a firm seat on every sort of ground, it may be perhaps be thought a little irksome to be perpetually marching out, when there is no war;[26] but all the same, I would have you call your men together and impress upon them the need to train themselves, when they ride into the country to their farms, or elsewhere, by leaving the high road and galloping at a round pace on ground of every