Today's Stichomancy for Jack Nicholson

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Iron Puddler by James J. Davis:

myself at the head of the Local, and nearly every man had voted for me. I started negotiations for more frequent paydays, and a few months later we were being paid on the first and fifteenth of the month. Life is indeed dramatic,--at least it has seemed so to me. Some men say that life has no meaning; that men are the playthings of blind forces that crush them, and there is no answer to the riddle. This is nonsense. I admit that we are in the grip of blind forces. But we are not blind. We can not change those forces. If we fight against them they will crush us. But by going with them, guiding our careers along their courses, they will bear us to the port we're steering for.

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson:

- my superstition, if you like - that who is faithful to his map, and consults it, and draws from it his inspiration, daily and hourly, gains positive support, and not mere negative immunity from accident. The tale has a root there; it grows in that soil; it has a spine of its own behind the words. Better if the country be real, and he has walked every foot of it and knows every milestone. But even with imaginary places, he will do well in the beginning to provide a map; as he studies it, relations will appear that he had not thought upon; he will discover obvious, though unsuspected, short-cuts and footprints for his messengers;

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Helen of Troy And Other Poems by Sara Teasdale:

For tho' I know he loves me, To-night my heart is sad; His kiss was not so wonderful As all the dreams I had.

November

The world is tired, the year is old, The little leaves are glad to die, The wind goes shivering with cold Among the rushes dry.

Our love is dying like the grass, And we who kissed grow coldly kind,

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 Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre:

which is warmer than the rest, a column of lighter, ascending air is generated. If this column catch the threads, my Spiders ought to rise to the ceiling of the room.

The curious ascent does, in fact, take place. Unfortunately, my troop, which has been greatly reduced by the number of departures through the window, does not lend itself to prolonged experiment. We must begin again.

The next morning, on the same yucca, I gather the second family, as numerous as the first. Yesterday's preparations are repeated. My legion of Spiders first weaves a divergent framework between the top of the brushwood placed at the emigrants' disposal and the edge

The Life of the Spider