Today's Stichomancy for Orson Welles
| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: "Thank you," she repeated as she turned away.
She struck westward through the dreary March twilight, toward the
street where her boarding-house stood. She had resolutely refused
Gerty's offer of hospitality. Something of her mother's fierce
shrinking from observation and sympathy was beginning to develop
in her, and the promiscuity of small quarters and close intimacy
seemed, on the whole, less endurable than the solitude of a hall
bedroom in a house where she could come and go unremarked among
other workers. For a while she had been sustained by this desire
for privacy and independence; but now, perhaps from increasing
physical weariness, the lassitude brought about by hours of
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from 1492 by Mary Johntson: here a week and overhaul the ships, and that while that
was doing, there should be sent two or three with Indian
guides to find, if might be, this river and this town.
And there were chosen, and given a week to go and come,
Juan Lepe, Luis Torres and a seaman Roderigo Jerez,
with Diego Colon, the Fernandina youth. Likewise there
would go two Indians of this village, blithe enough to
show their country to the gods and the gods to their country.
The next day being Sunday, Fray Ignatio preached a sermon
to the Indians. He assumed, and at this time I think
the Admiral assumed, that these folk had no religion. That
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic: that it was his presence alone which protected him from
open violence at the hands of these savage hackmen.
He tightened his clutch on his valise, and, turning his back
on them and their uproar, tried to brave it out and stand
where he was. But the policeman came lounging slowly
toward him, with such authority in his swaying gait,
and such urban omniscience written all over his broad,
sandy face, that he lost heart, and beat an abrupt retreat
off to the right, where there were a number of doorways,
near which other people had ventured to put down baggage
on the floor.
 The Damnation of Theron Ware |
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 Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: because earned by patient and accurate toil in a good cause: but
Vesalius, being but a mortal man, may have contracted in those same
days a temper of imperiousness and self-conceit, such as he showed
afterwards when his pupil Fallopius dared to add fresh discoveries
to those of his master. And yet, in spite of all Vesalius knew, how
little he knew! How humbling to his pride it would have been had he
known then--perhaps he does know now--that he had actually again and
again walked, as it were, round and round the true theory of the
circulation of the blood, and yet never seen it; that that discovery
which, once made, is intelligible, as far as any phenomenon is
intelligible, to the merest peasant, was reserved for another
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