Today's Stichomancy for Martin Luther King Jr.

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad:

a slightly amused serenity. And she was smiling. What on earth was she smiling at? She remarked casually:

"I am afraid I interrupted you."

"Not at all."

She accepted the denial in perfect good faith. And it was strictly true. Interrupted--indeed! She had robbed me of at least twenty lives, each infinitely more poignant and real than her own, because informed with passion, possessed of convictions, involved in great affairs created out of my own substance for an anxiously meditated end.

She remained silent for a while, then said, with a last glance

A Personal Record

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac:

from Charles, of course, didn't it?" continued the old man.

"Yes, father; it is not mine. It is a sacred trust."

"Ta, ta, ta, ta! He took your fortune, and now you can get it back."

"Father!"

Grandet took his knife to pry out some of the gold; to do this, he placed the dressing-case on a chair. Eugenie sprang forward to recover it; but her father, who had his eye on her and on the treasure too, pushed her back so violently with a thrust of his arm that she fell upon her mother's bed.

"Monsieur, monsieur!" cried the mother, lifting herself up.

Grandet had opened his knife, and was about to apply it to the gold.

Eugenie Grandet

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Hiero by Xenophon:

[10] Or, "they are mental partly, partly physical."

[11] Lit. "the incidents of waking life present sensations of a more vivid character."

To this statement Hiero made answer: And I, for my part, O Simonides, would find it hard to state, outside the list of things which you have named yourself, in what respect the despot can have other channels of perception.[12] So that up to this point I do not see that the despotic life differs in any way at all from that of common people.

[12] i.e. "being like constituted, the autocratic person has no other sources of perception: he has no claim to a wider gamut of sensation, and consequently thus far there is not a pin to choose

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 Heroes by Charles Kingsley:

the water's edge, under a black rock, he saw a white image stand.

'This,' thought he, 'must surely be the statue of some sea- God; I will go near and see what kind of Gods these barbarians worship.'

So he came near; but when he came, it was no statue, but a maiden of flesh and blood; for he could see her tresses streaming in the breeze; and as he came closer still, he could see how she shrank and shivered when the waves sprinkled her with cold salt spray. Her arms were spread above her head, and fastened to the rock with chains of