Today's Stichomancy for B. F. Skinner

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

books and parchments on the office wall with one lick of its tongue, and leave him in a minute standing in nakedness, if he gave way to it. His endeavor, for many years, had been to control the spirit, and at the age of twenty-nine he thought he could pride himself upon a life rigidly divided into the hours of work and those of dreams; the two lived side by side without harming each other. As a matter of fact, this effort at discipline had been helped by the interests of a difficult profession, but the old conclusion to which Ralph had come when he left college still held sway in his mind, and tinged his views with the melancholy belief that life for most people compels the exercise of the lower gifts and wastes the precious ones, until it

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Tattine by Ruth Ogden [Mrs. Charles W. Ide]:

"Now, Joey, you wait here till I go bring something for a tombstone," Tattine directed, and in a second she was back again with the cover of a box in one hand and a red crayon in the other. Sitting flat upon the grass, she printed on the cover in rather irregular letters:--

BORN--I don't know when. DIED June 17th. LAVERACK SETTERS NOT ALLOWED.

This she put securely into place, while Joey raked up a little about the spot, and they left the little rabbit grave looking very neat and tidy. The next morning Tattine ran out to see how the little wild-wood plant was growing, and then she stood with her arms akimbo in blank astonishment. The little grave had disappeared. She kicked aside the loose earth, and saw that box and Bunny

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Mansion by Henry van Dyke:

twenty years and whose only child was a crippled daughter, for whose comfort and happiness he had toiled and sacrificed himself without stint. It was a surprise to find him here, as care-free and joyful as the rest.

The lives of others in the company were revealed in brief glimpses as they talked together--a mother, early widowed, who had kept her little flock of children together and labored through hard and heavy

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 Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake:

'Look on the rising sun: there God does live, And gives His light, and gives His heat away, And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.

'And we are put on earth a little space, That we may learn to bear the beams of love; And these black bodies and this sunburnt face Are but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

'For, when our souls have learned the heat to bear, The cloud will vanish, we shall hear His voice, Saying, "Come out from the grove, my love and care,

Songs of Innocence and Experience