Today's Stichomancy for Catherine Zeta-Jones

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

(2) My MILTON in the three vols. in green. (3) The SHAKESPEARE that Babington sent me for a wedding-gift. (4) Hazlitt's TABLE TALK AND PLAIN SPEAKER.

If you care to get a box of books from Douglas and Foulis, let them be SOLID. CROKER PAPERS, CORRESPONDENCE OF NAPOLEON, HISTORY OF HENRY IV., Lang's FOLK LORE, would be my desires.

I had a charming letter from Henry James about my LONGMAN paper. I did not understand queries about the verses; the pictures to the Seagull I thought charming; those to the second have left me with a pain in my poor belly and a swimming in the head.

About money, I am afloat and no more, and I warn you, unless I have

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin:

advantage of slight successive variations; she can never take a leap, but must advance by the shortest and slowest steps.

Organs of little apparent importance. -- As natural selection acts by life and death,--by the preservation of individuals with any favourable variation, and by the destruction of those with any unfavourable deviation of structure,--I have sometimes felt much difficulty in understanding the origin of simple parts, of which the importance does not seem sufficient to cause the preservation of successively varying individuals. I have sometimes felt as much difficulty, though of a very different kind, on this head, as in the case of an organ as perfect and complex as the eye.

In the first place, we are much too ignorant in regard to the whole economy

On the Origin of Species

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke:

The rod was a reward, yet not exactly of merit. It was an instrument of education in the hand of a father less indiscriminate than Solomon, who chose to interpret the text in a new way, and preferred to educate his child by encouraging him in pursuits which were harmless and wholesome, rather than by chastising him for practices which would likely enough never have been thought of, if they had not been forbidden. The boy enjoyed this kind of father at the time, and later he came to understand, with a grateful heart, that there is no richer inheritance in all the treasury of unearned blessings. For, after all, the love, the patience, the kindly wisdom of a grown man who can enter into the perplexities

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 Symposium by Xenophon:

movement of his supple body?

To which Charmides replied: How like a flatterer you are! one would think you had set yourself to puff the dancing-master.[27]

[27] See "The Critic," I. ii.

To be sure (he answered solemnly); and there's another point I could not help observing: how while he danced no portion of his body remained idle; neck and legs and hands together, one and all were exercised.[28] That is how a man should dance, who wants to keep his body light and healthy.[29] (Then turning to the Syracusan, he added): I cannot say how much obliged I should be to you, O man of Syracuse, for lessons in deportment. Pray teach me my steps.[30]

The Symposium