Today's Stichomancy for Woody Allen
| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Charmides and Other Poems by Oscar Wilde: Which to no lover will Athena show,
The grand cool flanks, the crescent thighs, the bossy hills of
snow.
Those who have never known a lover's sin
Let them not read my ditty, it will be
To their dull ears so musicless and thin
That they will have no joy of it, but ye
To whose wan cheeks now creeps the lingering smile,
Ye who have learned who Eros is, - O listen yet awhile.
A little space he let his greedy eyes
Rest on the burnished image, till mere sight
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: The pink fishing license did not seem to be of much use. Its
exhibition was demanded only twice. Once a river guardian, who was
walking down the stream with a Belgian Baron and encouraging him to
continue fishing, climbed out to me on the end of a long
embankment, and with proper apologies begged to be favoured with a
view of my document. It turned out that his request was a favour
to me, for it discovered the fact that I had left my fly-book, with
the pink card in it, beside an old mill, a quarter of a mile up the
stream.
Another time I was sitting beside the road, trying to get out of a
very long, wet, awkward pair of wading-stockings, an occupation
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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 Apology by Plato: of the 'accustomed manner' in which Socrates spoke in 'the agora and among
the tables of the money-changers.' The allusion in the Crito may, perhaps,
be adduced as a further evidence of the literal accuracy of some parts.
But in the main it must be regarded as the ideal of Socrates, according to
Plato's conception of him, appearing in the greatest and most public scene
of his life, and in the height of his triumph, when he is weakest, and yet
his mastery over mankind is greatest, and his habitual irony acquires a new
meaning and a sort of tragic pathos in the face of death. The facts of his
life are summed up, and the features of his character are brought out as if
by accident in the course of the defence. The conversational manner, the
seeming want of arrangement, the ironical simplicity, are found to result
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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 Complete Poems of Longfellow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Is it a phantom of air,--a bodiless, spectral illusion?
Is it a ghost from the grave, that has come to forbid the
betrothal?
Long had it stood there unseen, a guest uninvited, unwelcomed;
Over its clouded eyes there had passed at times an expression
Softening the gloom and revealing the warm heart hidden beneath
them,
As when across the sky the driving rack of the rain-cloud
Grows for a moment thin, and betrays the sun by its brightness.
Once it had lifted its hand, and moved its lips, but was silent,
As if an iron will had mastered the fleeting intention.
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