Today's Stichomancy for Will Wright
| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: cat-tails, mulleins, johnswort, hard-hack, meadow-sweet, and other
strong-stemmed plants, those unexhausted granaries which entertain
the earliest birds -- decent weeds, at least, which widowed Nature
wears. I am particularly attracted by the arching and sheaf-like
top of the wool-grass; it brings back the summer to our winter
memories, and is among the forms which art loves to copy, and which,
in the vegetable kingdom, have the same relation to types already in
the mind of man that astronomy has. It is an antique style, older
than Greek or Egyptian. Many of the phenomena of Winter are
suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We
are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous
Walden |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful
empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over
parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected
the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of
Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one,
endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the
region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in
the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind. She was
pre-eminent in courage and military skill, and was the leader of the
Hellenes. And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand
alone, after having undergone the very extremity of danger, she defeated
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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 Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: aspiration, as you are drawn by hunger to seek food.
"To give you an example of affinities linked to similitudes (a
secondary law on which the creations of your thought are based),
music, that celestial art, is the working out of this principle; for
is it not a complement of sounds harmonized by number? Is not sound a
modification of air, compressed, dilated, echoed? You know the
composition of air,--oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. As you cannot
obtain sound from the void, it is plain that music and the human voice
are the result of organized chemical substances, which put themselves
in unison with the same substances prepared within you by your
thought, co-ordinated by means of light, the great nourisher of your
Seraphita |
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 Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: that writer himself I am not speaking: he is diligent,
clean, and pleasing; we all owe him periods of entertainment,
and he has achieved an amiable popularity which he has
adequately deserved. But the truth is, he does not, or did
not when he first embraced it, regard his profession from
this purely mercenary side. He went into it, I shall venture
to say, if not with any noble design, at least in the ardour
of a first love; and he enjoyed its practice long before he
paused to calculate the wage. The other day an author was
complimented on a piece of work, good in itself and
exceptionally good for him, and replied, in terms unworthy of
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