Today's Stichomancy for Alan Moore

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac:

"No."

"Well, it means that the Greeks never proposed a good bit of business to the Trojans without getting their fair share of it. In the olden time they used to say, 'Take my horse.' Now we say, 'Take my bear.' Well, what do you want, Ulysses-Lagingeole-Elie Magus?"

These words will give an idea of the mildness and wit with which Fougeres employed what painters call studio fun.

"Well, I don't deny that you are to paint me two pictures for nothing."

"Oh! oh!"

"I'll leave you to do it, or not; I don't ask it. But you're an honest

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Philosophy 4 by Owen Wister:

"But a billion dollars is inconceivable," retorted the boy. "No mind can take in a sum of that size; but it exists."

"Put that down! put that down!" shrieked the other boy. "You've struck something. If we get Berkeley on the paper, I'll run that in." He wrote rapidly, and then took a turn around the room, frowning as he walked. "The actuality of a thing," said he, summing his clever thoughts up, "is not disproved by its being inconceivable. Ideas alone depend upon thought for their existence. There! Anybody can get off stuff like that by the yard." He picked up a cork and a foot-rule, tossed the cork, and sent it flying out of the window with the foot-rule.

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Island Nights' Entertainments by Robert Louis Stevenson:

about what it comes to, as well as I can make out: None of the people are to trade with me, and they're all to trade with you. You're to have the copra, and I'm to go to the devil and shake myself. And I don't know any native, and you're the only man here worth mention that speaks English, and you have the gall to up and hint to me my life's in danger, and all you've got to tell me is you don't know why!"

"Well, it IS all I have to tell you," said he. "I don't know - I wish I did."

"And so you turn your back and leave me to myself! Is that the position?" says I.

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 Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy:

métier, literature." In 1870, before the date of the quarrel, Turgénieff wrote to Fet: "Lyoff Tolstoy continues to play the crank. It was evidently written in his stars. When will he turn his last somersault and stand on his feet at last?" Turgénieff was just the same about my father's "Confession," which he read not long before his death. Having promised to read it, "to try to understand it," and "not to lose my temper," he "started to write a long letter in answer to the 'Confession,' but never finished it . . . for fear of becoming