Today's Stichomancy for Neal Stephenson

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed by Edna Ferber:

given it at once to my husband, as a wife should. Yesterday it came, but I said nothing, and when my husband said to me, `Anna, did not the money come as usual to-day? It is time,' I told a little lie--but a little one, is it not? Very amusing it was. Almost I did laugh. Na, he will not be cross when he see how his wife like the Amerikanische ladies will look. He admires very much the ladies of Amerika. Many times he has said so.

("I'll wager he has--the great, ugly boor!" I thought, in parenthesis.) "We'll show him!" I said,

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum:

life."

The Munchkin boy said this with much pride and pleasure.

"Good!" exclaimed the Tin Woodman; "I congratulate you. But what is the fifth and last thing you need, in order to complete the magic charm?"

"The left wing of a yellow butterfly," said Ojo. "In this yellow country, and with your kind assistance, that ought to be very easy to find."

The Patchwork Girl of Oz

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather:

we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share--black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.

Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared; the ball dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The fields below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie.

My Antonia

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 Iron Puddler by James J. Davis:

instead of a five-cent flop with the rest of them. And I was assigned to the royal suite of that flop house, which consisted of a cot with a mosquito bar over it.

At this time they were holding "kangaroo" court in the New Orleans jail. Every vagrant picked up by the police was tried and sentenced and shipped out to a chain-gang camp. Nearly every man tried was convicted. And there were plenty of camp bosses ready to "buy" every vagrant the officers could run in. My bunch down at the flop house was in deadly terror of being "kangarooed" and sent to a peon camp in the rice swamps.

One day when I was renewing the fuel in the room of a Mrs.