Today's Stichomancy for George Bernard Shaw

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:

d'Arthez' chateau, where I am doing a dining-room, and Leon de Lora the tops of the doors--masterpieces! Come and see us."

And off he went without taking leave, having had enough of looking at Virginie.

"Who is that man?" asked Madame Vervelle.

"A great artist," answered Grassou.

There was silence for a moment.

"Are you quite sure," said Virginie, "that he has done no harm to my portrait? He frightened me."

"He has only done it good," replied Grassou.

"Well, if he is a great artist, I prefer a great artist like you,"

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche:

men of ANTIQUITY, who knew by their own schooling how to appreciate the virtue therein, the rareness and the difficulty in the deliverance of such a period;--WE have really no right to the BIG period, we modern men, who are short of breath in every sense! Those ancients, indeed, were all of them dilettanti in speaking, consequently connoisseurs, consequently critics--they thus brought their orators to the highest pitch; in the same manner as in the last century, when all Italian ladies and gentlemen knew how to sing, the virtuosoship of song (and with it also the art of melody) reached its elevation. In Germany, however (until quite recently when a kind of platform eloquence

Beyond Good and Evil

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft:

and in the symmetries of the broken columns there seemed to be some dark and inner meaning which did not invite solution. And what the structure and proportions of the olden worshippers could have been, Carter steadily refused to conjecture. When the ship rounded the edge, and sailed over those lands unseen by man, there appeared in the queer landscape certain signs of life, and Carter saw many low, broad, round cottages in fields of grotesque whitish fungi. He noticed that these cottages had no windows, and thought that their shape suggested the huts of Esquimaux. Then he glimpsed the oily waves of a sluggish sea, and knew that the voyage was

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

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 Alcibiades II by Platonic Imitator:

SOCRATES: And if you made many attempts, and each time failed to recognize Pericles, you would never attack him?

ALCIBIADES: Never.

SOCRATES: Well, but if Orestes in like manner had not known his mother, do you think that he would ever have laid hands upon her?

ALCIBIADES: No.

SOCRATES: He did not intend to slay the first woman he came across, nor any one else's mother, but only his own?

ALCIBIADES: True.

SOCRATES: Ignorance, then, is better for those who are in such a frame of mind, and have such ideas?