Today's Stichomancy for Karl Rove

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf:

(Lily looked up, as she had seen Mrs Ramsay look up; she too heard a wave falling on the beach.) And then what stirred and trembled in her mind when the children cried, "How's that? How's that?" cricketing? She would stop knitting for a second. She would look intent. Then she would lapse again, and suddenly Mr Ramsay stopped dead in his pacing in front of her and some curious shock passed through her and seemed to rock her in profound agitation on its breast when stopping there he stood over her and looked down at her. Lily could see him.

He stretched out his hand and raised her from her chair. It seemed somehow as if he had done it before; as if he had once bent in the same way and raised her from a boat which, lying a few inches off some

To the Lighthouse

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad:

sleep the ships with white sails. He is all things to all oceans; he is like a poet seated upon a throne - magnificent, simple, barbarous, pensive, generous, impulsive, changeable, unfathomable - but when you understand him, always the same. Some of his sunsets are like pageants devised for the delight of the multitude, when all the gems of the royal treasure-house are displayed above the sea. Others are like the opening of his royal confidence, tinged with thoughts of sadness and compassion in a melancholy splendour meditating upon the short-lived peace of the waters. And I have seen him put the pent-up anger of his heart into the aspect of the inaccessible sun, and cause it to glare fiercely like the eye of an

The Mirror of the Sea

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken:

Ha ha! there's one thing you will never know! That's what you get for meddling so with heaven!

Where have you been, old lady? Where are you going? We know, we know! She's been to gab with spirits. Look at the old fool! getting ready to cry! What have you got in an envelope, old lady? A lock of hair? An eyelash from his eye?

How do you know the medium didn't fool you? Perhaps he had no spirit--perhaps he killed it. Here she comes! the old fool's lost her son. What did he have--blue eyes and golden hair?

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 Dreams by Olive Schreiner:

his breast like lead. He could not move with it. He could not leave those valleys with it. Then again he took it out and looked at it.

"Oh, my beautiful! my heart's own!" he cried, "may I not keep you?"

He opened his hands sadly.

"Go!" he said. "It may happen that in Truth's song one note is like yours; but I shall never hear it."

Sadly he opened his hand, and the bird flew from him forever.

Then from the shuttle of Imagination he took the thread of his wishes, and threw it on the ground; and the empty shuttle he put into his breast, for the thread was made in those valleys, but the shuttle came from an unknown country. He turned to go, but now the people came about him, howling.