Today's Stichomancy for P Diddy

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Psychology of Revolution by Gustave le Bon:

The difficulty of reconciling democratic equalisation with natural inequalities constitutes one of the most difficult problems of the present hour. We know what are the desires of democracy. Let us see what Nature replies to these demands.

The democratic ideas which have so often shaken the world from the heroic ages of Greece to modern times are always clashing with natural inequalities. Some observers have held, with Helvetius, that the inequality between men is created by education.

As a matter of fact, Nature does not know such a thing as equality. She distributes unevenly genius, beauty, health,

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

Here, too, is brought, so the fable runs, all the waste stuff of the nation--everything that is subject to rot, and that can add to the foul stench that assails our nostrils. "And death lurks at every step among rotting dead, for here the fierce apts lair, adding to the putrid accumulation with the fragments of their own prey which they cannot devour. It is a horrid avenue to our goal, but it is the only one." "You are sure, then, that we have found the way to the land of the yellow men?" I cried.

The Warlord of Mars

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson:

our mountain. There, at Calistoga, the railroad ceases, and the traveller who intends faring farther, to the Geysers or to the springs in Lake County, must cross the spurs of the mountain by stage. Thus, Mount Saint Helena is not only a summit, but a frontier; and, up to the time of writing, it has stayed the progress of the iron horse.

PART I - IN THE VALLEY

CHAPTER I - CALISTOGA

IT is difficult for a European to imagine Calistoga, the whole place is so new, and of such an accidental pattern; the very name, I hear, was invented at a supper-party by the man

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 Coxon Fund by Henry James:

with only four hundred a year. This explanation indeed didn't wholly content me, not even when I learned that her mourning had a double cause--learned that poor Mr. Anvoy, giving way altogether, buried under the ruins of his fortune and leaving next to nothing, had died a few weeks before.

"So she has come out to marry George Gravener?" I commented. "Wouldn't it have been prettier of him to have saved her the trouble?"

"Hasn't the House just met?" Adelaide replied. "And for Mr. Gravener the House--!" Then she added: "I gather that her having come is exactly a sign that the marriage is a little shaky. If it