Today's Stichomancy for Nick Nolte

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Moral Emblems by Robert Louis Stevenson:

And Robin, like a boastful sailor, Despised the other for a tailor.

'See,' he remarked, 'with envy, see A man with such a fist as me! Bearded and ringed, and big, and brown, I sit and toss the stingo down. Hear the gold jingle in my bag - All won beneath the Jolly Flag!'

Ben moralised and shook his head: 'You wanderers earn and eat your bread. The foe is found, beats or is beaten,

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Hermione's Little Group of Serious Thinkers by Don Marquis:

Which hath a hornet on his burning bean? Last night, last night -- historic yestere'en! -- Hermione's Salon was opened up!

Without, the night was cold. But Thought, within, Roared through the rooms as red and hot as Sin. Without, the night was calm; within, the surge And snap of Thought kept up a crackling din As if in sport the well-known Cosmic Urge with Psychic Slapsticks whacked the dome and Shin

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne:

the middle of the equinox of that year. The tempest raged without intermission from the 18th to the 26th of March. Its ravages were terrible in America, Europe, and Asia, covering a distance of eighteen hundred miles, and extending obliquely to the equator from the thirty-fifth north parallel to the fortieth south parallel. Towns were overthrown, forests uprooted, coasts devastated by the mountains of water which were precipitated on them, vessels cast on the shore, which the published accounts numbered by hundreds, whole districts leveled by waterspouts which destroyed everything they passed over, several thousand people crushed on land or drowned at sea; such were the traces of its fury, left by this devastating tempest. It surpassed in disasters those which so frightfully

The Mysterious Island

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 Death of the Lion by Henry James:

scatter of the company which, under the Doctor's rule, began to take place in the evening? His rule was soothing to behold, small comfort as I was to have at the end. He decreed in the interest of his patient an absolutely soundless house and a consequent break-up of the party. Little country practitioner as he was, he literally packed off the Princess. She departed as promptly as if a revolution had broken out, and Guy Walsingham emigrated with her. I was kindly permitted to remain, and this was not denied even to Mrs. Wimbush. The privilege was withheld indeed from Dora Forbes; so Mrs. Wimbush kept her latest capture temporarily concealed. This was so little, however, her usual way of dealing with her