Today's Stichomancy for Kobe Bryant

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy:

after her exertions of yesterday?"

"She has felt a bit weary; and has gone to bed airly on that account.

Henchard returned to the letters, sorting them over with interest, Farfrae being seated at the other end of the dining-table. "You don't forget, of course," he resumed, "that curious chapter in the history of my past which I told you of, and that you gave me some assistance in? These letters are, in fact, related to that unhappy business. Though, thank God, it is all over now."

"What became of the poor woman?" asked Farfrae.

The Mayor of Casterbridge

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Laches by Plato:

more thorough way of examining the question will be to ask, 'What is Virtue?'--or rather, to restrict the enquiry to that part of virtue which is concerned with the use of weapons--'What is Courage?' Laches thinks that he knows this: (1) 'He is courageous who remains at his post.' But some nations fight flying, after the manner of Aeneas in Homer; or as the heavy-armed Spartans also did at the battle of Plataea. (2) Socrates wants a more general definition, not only of military courage, but of courage of all sorts, tried both amid pleasures and pains. Laches replies that this universal courage is endurance. But courage is a good thing, and mere endurance may be hurtful and injurious. Therefore (3) the element of intelligence must be added. But then again unintelligent endurance may

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Lesson of the Master by Henry James:

attached, and took his way northward.

He had been absent from London for two years - two years which, seeming to count as more, had made such a difference in his own life - through the production of a novel far stronger, he believed, than "Ginistrella" - that he turned out into Piccadilly, the morning after his arrival, with a vague expectation of changes, of finding great things had happened. But there were few transformations in Piccadilly - only three or four big red houses where there had been low black ones - and the brightness of the end of June peeped through the rusty railings of the Green Park and glittered in the varnish of the rolling carriages as he had seen it

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 Pathology of Lying, Etc. by William and Mary Healy:

negation. After he served his sentence this young man was lost sight of. Even in the institution to which he had been sent he continued his fanciful and often hideous stories, still largely centered about the idea that he had suffered unjustly wherever he had been.

No complete summary of causative factors is possible in this case. The major cause for his lying as well as other delinquencies, particularly his vagrancy, is, of course, the mental traits peculiar to epilepsy.

CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSIONS