Today's Stichomancy for Al Pacino
| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: He hunted through the medicine-cabinet for a packet of new razor-blades
(reflecting, as invariably, "Be cheaper to buy one of these dinguses and strop
your own blades,") and when he discovered the packet, behind the round box of
bicarbonate of soda, he thought ill of his wife for putting it there and very
well of himself for not saying "Damn." But he did say it, immediately
afterward, when with wet and soap-slippery fingers he tried to remove the
horrible little envelope and crisp clinging oiled paper from the new blade.
Then there was the problem, oft-pondered, never solved, of what to do with the
old blade, which might imperil the fingers of his young. As usual, he tossed
it on top of the medicine-cabinet, with a mental note that some day he must
remove the fifty or sixty other blades that were also temporarily, piled up
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Hero of Our Time by M.Y. Lermontov: with my head. I weigh, analyse my own passions
and actions with severe curiosity, but without
sympathy. There are two personalities within
me: one lives -- in the complete sense of the
word -- the other reflects and judges him; the
first, it may be, in an hour's time, will take fare-
well of you and the world for ever, and the second
-- the second? . . . Look, doctor, do you see those
three black figures on the cliff, to the right?
They are our antagonists, I suppose?" . . .
We pushed on.
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Margret Howth: A Story of To-day by Rebecca Harding Davis: laid the day-books and this ledger open on the desk for her. As
soon as he was gone, she shut the door, listening until his heavy
boots had thumped creaking down the rickety ladder leading to the
frame-rooms. Then she climbed up on the high office-stool
(climbed, I said, for she was a little, lithe thing) and went to
work, opening the books, and copying from one to the other as
steadily, monotonously, as if she had been used to it all her
life. Here are the first pages: see how sharp the angles are of
the blue and black lines, how even the long columns: one would
not think, that, as the steel pen traced them out, it seemed to
be lining out her life, narrow and black. If any such morbid
Margret Howth: A Story of To-day |
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 Complete Angler by Izaak Walton: who never leaves or forsakes his first scent, but follows it through so
many changes and varieties of other scents, even over, and in, the
water, and into the earth! What music doth a pack of dogs then make to
any man, whose heart and ears are so happy as to be set to the tune of
such instruments! How will a right Greyhound fix his eye on the best
Buck in a herd, single him out, and follow him, and him only, through a
whole herd of rascal game, and still know and then kill him! For my
hounds, I know the language of them, and they know the language and
meaning of one another, as perfectly as we know the voices of those
with whom we discourse daily.
I might enlarge myself in the commendation of Hunting, and of the
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