Today's Stichomancy for Shakira

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe:

agreement that he obliged them to make when they took those women, viz. that they should choose them out by consent, and keep separately to them; which, by the way, is nothing of a marriage, no agreement with the women as wives, but only an agreement among themselves, to keep them from quarrelling. But, sir, the essence of the sacrament of matrimony" (so he called it, being a Roman) "consists not only in the mutual consent of the parties to take one another as man and wife, but in the formal and legal obligation that there is in the contract to compel the man and woman, at all times, to own and acknowledge each other; obliging the man to abstain from all other women, to engage in no other contract while

Robinson Crusoe

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Letters from England by Elizabeth Davis Bancroft:

party with Sir William Hooker and Lady Hooker. . . . Sir William Hooker is one of the most interesting persons I have seen in England. He is a great naturalist and has the charge of the great Botanical Gardens at Kew. He devoted a morning to us there, and it was the most delightful one I have passed. There are twenty-eight different conservatories filled with the vegetable wonders of the whole world. Length of time and regal wealth have conspired to make the Kew gardens beyond our conceptions entirely. . . . Sir William pointed out to us all that was very rare or curious, which added much to my pleasure. . . . He showed us a drawing of the largest FLOWER ever known on earth, which Sir Stamford Raffles discovered in

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy:

that feeling which we called 'love.' The next morning, when, after the reconciliation, I confessed to her that I was jealous of Troukhatchevsky, she was not at all embarrassed, and began to laugh in the most natural way, so strange did the possibility of being led astray by such a man appear to her.

"'With such a man can an honest woman entertain any feeling beyond the pleasure of enjoying music with him? But if you like, I am ready to never see him again, even on Sunday, although everybody has been invited. Write him that I am indisposed, and that will end the matter. Only one thing annoys me,--that any one could have thought him dangerous. I am too proud not to

The Kreutzer Sonata

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 Europeans by Henry James:

extemporized in the little house among the apple-trees. The grave gentleman felt himself more and more fascinated by his clever nephew, whose fresh, demonstrative youth seemed a compendium of experiences so strangely numerous. It appeared to him that Felix must know a great deal; he would like to learn what he thought about some of those things as regards which his own conversation had always been formal, but his knowledge vague. Felix had a confident, gayly trenchant way of judging human actions which Mr. Wentworth grew little by little to envy; it seemed like criticism made easy. Forming an opinion--say on a person's conduct--was, with Mr. Wentworth, a good deal like fumbling in a lock with a key chosen at hazard.