Today's Stichomancy for Ariel Sharon

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad:

exalted hand, folded it in four (it was a sheet of blue foolscap) and presented it to me--a gift of ex- traordinary potency, for, as I put it in my pocket, my head swam a little.

"This is your appointment to the command," he said with a certain gravity. "An official appoint- ment binding the owners to conditions which you have accepted. Now--when will you be ready to go?"

I said I would be ready that very day if neces- sary. He caught me at my word with great

The Shadow Line

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy:

with Sue.

The city of learning wore an estranged look, and he had lost all feeling for its associations. Yet as the sun made vivid lights and shades of the mullioned architecture of the facades, and drew patterns of the crinkled battlements on the young turf of the quadrangles, Jude thought he had never seen the place look more beautiful. He came to the street in which he had first beheld Sue. The chair she had occupied when, leaning over her ecclesiastical scrolls, a hog-hair brush in her hand, her girlish figure had arrested the gaze of his inquiring eyes, stood precisely in its former spot, empty. It was as if she were dead, and nobody had been found capable of

Jude the Obscure

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Helen of Troy And Other Poems by Sara Teasdale:

[This etext has been transcribed from the original edition, which was published in New York in 1911.]

Helen of Troy And Other Poems

By Sara Teasdale Author of "Sonnets to Duse, and Other Poems"

To Marion Cummings Stanley

Contents

Helen of Troy Beatrice Sappho Marianna Alcoforando

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 Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

The children they hear with delight.

"And year upon year with swift footstep now steals, The mantle it fades, many rents it reveals,

The maiden no more it can hold. The father he sees her, what rapture he feels!

His joy cannot now be controll'd. How worthy she seems of the race whence she springs,

How noble and fair to the sight! What wealth to her dearly-loved father she brings!"--

The children they hear with delight.

"Then comes there a princely knight galloping by,