Today's Stichomancy for Jack Kerouac

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

Begin! The love of Gallus be our theme, And the shrewd pangs he suffered, while, hard by, The flat-nosed she-goats browse the tender brush. We sing not to deaf ears; no word of ours But the woods echo it. What groves or lawns Held you, ye Dryad-maidens, when for love- Love all unworthy of a loss so dear- Gallus lay dying? for neither did the slopes Of Pindus or Parnassus stay you then, No, nor Aonian Aganippe. Him Even the laurels and the tamarisks wept;

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The School For Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan:

come, get to your pulpit, Mr. Auctioneer; here's an old gouty chair of my grandfather's will answer the purpose.

CARELESS. Ay, ay, this will do. But, Charles, I haven't a hammer; and what's an auctioneer without his hammer?

CHARLES. Egad, that's true. What parchment have we here? Oh, our genealogy in full. [Taking pedigree down.] Here, Careless, you shall have no common bit of mahogany, here's the family tree for you, you rogue! This shall be your hammer, and now you may knock down my ancestors with their own pedigree.

SIR OLIVER. What an unnatural rogue!--an ex post facto parricide! [Aside.]

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson:

And then give up the ghost. Nahum's great grasshoppers were such as these, Sun-scattered and soon lost.

Whatever the dark road he may have taken, This man who stood on high And faced alone the sky, Whatever drove or lured or guided him, -- A vision answering a faith unshaken, An easy trust assumed of easy trials, A sick negation born of weak denials, A crazed abhorrence of an old condition,

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 Reign of King Edward the Third by William Shakespeare:

Besides, we hear, the Emperor conjoins, And stalls him in his own authority; But, all the mightier that their number is, The greater glory reaps the victory. Some friends have we beside domestic power; The stern Polonian, and the warlike Dane, The king of Bohemia, and of Sicily, Are all become confederates with us, And, as I think, are marching hither apace.

[Drum within.]

But soft, I hear the music of their drums,