Today's Stichomancy for Fritz Lang

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Human Drift by Jack London:

six millions of infants are annually destroyed, while the total infanticide record of the whole world is appalling. In Africa, now, human beings are dying by millions of the sleeping sickness.

More destructive of life than war, is industry. In all civilised countries great masses of people are crowded into slums and labour-ghettos, where disease festers, vice corrodes, and famine is chronic, and where they die more swiftly and in greater numbers than do the soldiers in our modern wars. The very infant mortality of a slum parish in the East End of London is three times that of a middle-class parish in the West End. In the United States, in the last fourteen years, a total of coal-miners,

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Richard III by William Shakespeare:

Letters to Richmond, you shall answer it. BUCKINGHAM. What says your Highness to my just request? KING RICHARD. I do remember me: Henry the Sixth Did prophesy that Richmond should be King, When Richmond was a little peevish boy. A king!-perhaps- BUCKINGHAM. My lord- KING RICHARD. How chance the prophet could not at that time Have told me, I being by, that I should kill him? BUCKINGHAM. My lord, your promise for the earldom-

Richard III

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from An Historical Mystery by Honore de Balzac:

they entered Paris, she had found Monsieur and Madame d'Hauteserre just finishing their dinner. Pressed by hunger she sat down to table without changing either her muddy habit or her boots. Instead of doing so at once after dinner, she was suddenly overcome with fatigue and allowed her head with its beautiful fair curls to drop on the back of the sofa, her feet being supported in front of her by a stool. The warmth of the fire had dried the mud on her habit and on her boots. Her doeskin gloves and the little peaked cap with its green veil and a whip lay on the table where she had flung them. She looked sometimes at the old Boule clock which stood on the mantelshelf between the candelabra, perhaps to judge if her four conspirators were asleep, and

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 Poems of William Blake by William Blake:

And court the fair eyed dew, to take me to her shining tent The weeping virgin, trembling kneels before the risen sun. Till we arise link'd in a golden band and never part: But walk united bearing food to all our tender flowers.

Dost thou O little cloud? I fear that I am not like thee: For I walk through the vales of Har, and smell the sweetest flowers: But I feed not the little flowers: I hear the warbling birds, But I feed not the warbling birds, they fly and seek their food: But Thel delights in these no more because I fade away And all shall say, without a use this shining women liv'd, Or did she only live to be at death the food of worms.

Poems of William Blake