Today's Stichomancy for Kurt Vonnegut

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Reef by Edith Wharton:

answered: "What has happened is simply that I'm rather tired. Will you ask Sophy to come up and see me here?"

While she waited she tried to think what she should say when the girl appeared; but she had never been more conscious of her inability to deal with the oblique and the tortuous. She had lacked the hard teachings of experience, and an instinctive disdain for whatever was less clear and open than her own conscience had kept her from learning anything of the intricacies and contradictions of other hearts. She said to herself: "I must find out----" yet everything in her recoiled from the means by which she felt it must be done...

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen:

he has found fault with the hanging of my curricle, and I cannot persuade him to buy my brown mare. If it will be any satisfaction to you, however, to be told, that I believe his character to be in other respects irreproachable, I am ready to confess it. And in return for an acknowledgment, which must give me some pain, you cannot deny me the privilege of disliking him as much as ever."

CHAPTER 11

Little had Mrs. Dashwood or her daughters imagined when they first came into Devonshire, that so many

Sense and Sensibility

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf:

and Miss Allan and Mrs. Elliot and the rest squatting on the stones and quacking, 'How jolly!'"

"We'll ask Venning and Perrott and Miss Murgatroyd--every one we can lay hands on," went on Hewet. "What's the name of the little old grasshopper with the eyeglasses? Pepper?--Pepper shall lead us."

"Thank God, you'll never get the donkeys," said Hirst.

"I must make a note of that," said Hewet, slowly dropping his feet to the floor. "Hirst escorts Miss Warrington; Pepper advances alone on a white ass; provisions equally distributed--or shall we hire a mule? The matrons--there's Mrs. Paley, by Jove!--share a carriage."

"That's where you'll go wrong," said Hirst. "Putting virgins

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 Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter:

we Moderns MUST reach it; we have got to attain to it--for the penalty of failure is and must be widespread Madness.

The power to still the mind--to be ABLE, mark you, when you want, to enter into the region of Rest, and to dismiss or command your Thoughts--is a condition of Health; it is a condition of all Power and Energy. For all health, whether of mind or body, resides in one's relation to the central Life within. If one cannot get into touch with THAT, then the life- forces cannot flow down into the organism. Most, perhaps all, disease arises from the disturbance of this connection. All mere hurry, all mere running after external things (as of the man

Pagan and Christian Creeds