Today's Stichomancy for Paul Newman

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Market-Place by Harold Frederic:

of any sort of unpleasantness. It's people who marry too young who do most of the fighting, I imagine. After people have got to a sensible age, and know what they want and what they can get along without, why then there's no reason for any trouble. We don't start out with any school-boy and school-girl moonshine"

"Oh, there's a good deal to be said for the moonshine," she interrupted him, as she sank upon the sofa.

"Why certainly," he assented, amiably, as he stood looking down at her. "The more there is of it, the better--if it comes naturally, and people know enough to understand

The Market-Place

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

and Madame Lardot turns me off? If I don't get away soon to Paris, I shall never be able to marry here, where men are so ridiculous."

"It can't be helped, my dear; society is changing; women are just as much victims to the present state of things as the nobility themselves. After political overturn comes the overturn of morals. Alas! before long woman won't exist" (he took out the cotton-wool to arrange his ears): "she'll lose everything by rushing into sentiment; she'll wring her nerves; good-bye to all the good little pleasures of our time, desired without shame, accepted without nonsense." (He polished up the little negroes' heads.) "Women had hysterics in those days to get their ends, but now" (he began to laugh) "their vapors end

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

My only joy is fled for evermore.

Let me taste those days so sweet,

Heav'n-descended, once again! Heart, dear heart! ay, warmly beat!

Spirit true, recall those days

Freeborn breath thy gentle lays

Mingled are with joy and pain.

Round the beds, so richly gleaming,

Rises up a palace fair; All with rosy fragrance teeming,

As in dream thou saw'st it ne'er.

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 What is Man? by Mark Twain:

their theory; then you can borrow money of them.

To be strictly fair, I will concede that now and then one of them will answer your letter, but when they do they avoid the issue--you cannot pin them down. When I discovered that the bee was human I wrote about it to all those scientists whom I have just mentioned. For evasions, I have seen nothing to equal the answers I got.

After the queen, the personage next in importance in the hive is the virgin. The virgins are fifty thousand or one hundred thousand in number, and they are the workers, the laborers. No work is done, in the hive or out of it, save by

What is Man?