Today's Stichomancy for Michael Jordan

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Main Street by Sinclair Lewis:

Thanatopsis. If you knew the trouble we had in getting the city council to spend the money and cover the pumping-station with vines! Whatever you may think of Gopher Prairie women, they're twice as progressive as the men."

"But can't the men see the ugliness?"

"They don't think it's ugly. And how can you prove it? Matter of taste. Why should they like what a Boston architect likes?"

"What they like is to sell prunes!"

"Well, why not? Anyway, the point is that you have to work from the inside, with what we have, rather than from the outside, with foreign ideas. The shell ought not to be

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Poems by Oscar Wilde:

altar day and night, Ten hundred lamps did wave their light through Ammon's carven house - and now

Foul snake and speckled adder with their young ones crawl from stone to stone For ruined is the house and prone the great rose-marble monolith!

Wild ass or trotting jackal comes and couches in the mouldering gates: Wild satyrs call unto their mates across the fallen fluted drums.

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Letters from England by Elizabeth Davis Bancroft:

us. There is none of the parade of eating in the largest evening party here. I see nothing but tea, and sometimes find an informal refreshment table in the room where we put on our cloaks.

I got a note yesterday from the O'Connor Don, enclosing an order to admit me to the House of Commons on Monday. . . . You will be curious to know who is "The O'Connor Don." He is Dennis O'Connor, Esq., but is of the oldest family in Ireland, and the representative of the last kings of Connaught. He is called altogether the O'Connor Don, and begins his note to me with that title. You remember Campbell's poem of "O'Connor's Child"?

Sunday, 14th February

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:

confirmed it with deeds. There have always been Tells in Switzerland--people who would not bow. There was a sufficiency of them at Rutli; there were plenty of them at Murten; plenty at Grandson; there are plenty today. And the first of them all--the very first, earliest banner-bearer of human freedom in this world--was not a man, but a woman--Stauffacher's wife. There she looms dim and great, through the haze of the centuries, delivering into her husband's ear that gospel of revolt which was to bear fruit in the conspiracy of Rutli and the birth of the first free government the world had ever seen.

From this Victoria Hotel one looks straight across a flat of

What is Man?