Today's Stichomancy for Jennifer Connelly
| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from In Darkest England and The Way Out by General William Booth: existence. There has never been any attempt to treat them as human
beings, to deal with them as individuals, to appeal to their hearts,
to help them on their legs again. They are simply units, no more
thought of and cared for than if they were so many coffee beans passing
through a coffee mill; and as the net result of all my experience and
observation of men and things, I must assert unhesitatingly that
anything which dehumanises the individual, anything which treats a man
as if he were only a number of a series or a cog in a wheel, without
any regard to the character, the aspirations, the temptations, and the
idiosyncrasies of the man, must utterly fail as a remedial agency.
The Casual Ward, at the best, is merely a squalid resting place for the
In Darkest England and The Way Out |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac: invariably bring women back to love? By dint of mingling with life and
grasping it in all its acts and interests, religion had made itself a
sharer of all virtues, the accomplice of all vices. Religion had
passed into science, into politics, into eloquence, into crimes, into
the flesh of the sick man and the poor man; it mounted thrones; it was
everywhere. These semi-learned observations will serve, perhaps, to
vindicate the truth of this study, certain details of which may
frighten the perfected morals of our age, which are, as everybody
knows, a trifle straitlaced.
At the moment when the chanting ceased and the last notes of the
organ, mingling with the vibrations of the loud "A-men" as it issued
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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 The Death of the Lion by Henry James: helplessly. For myself, I knew but too well what had happened, and
how a miracle - as pretty as some old miracle of legend - had been
wrought on the spot to save me. There had been a big brush of
wings, the flash of an opaline robe, and then, with a great cool
stir of the air, the sense of an angel's having swooped down and
caught me to his bosom. He held me only till the danger was over,
and it all took place in a minute. With my manuscript back on my
hands I understood the phenomenon better, and the reflexions I made
on it are what I meant, at the beginning of this anecdote, by my
change of heart. Mr. Pinhorn's note was not only a rebuke
decidedly stern, but an invitation immediately to send him - it was
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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 Paradise Lost by John Milton: Of all things transitory and vain, when sin
With vanity had filled the works of men:
Both all things vain, and all who in vain things
Built their fond hopes of glory or lasting fame,
Or happiness in this or the other life;
All who have their reward on earth, the fruits
Of painful superstition and blind zeal,
Nought seeking but the praise of men, here find
Fit retribution, empty as their deeds;
All the unaccomplished works of Nature's hand,
Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed,
Paradise Lost |
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