Today's Stichomancy for Louis B. Mayer

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe:

long improvised dirges will ring for ever in my ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vagueness at which I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not why;--from these paintings (vivid as their images now are before me) I would in vain endeavour to educe more than a small portion which should lie within the compass of merely written words. By the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea,

The Fall of the House of Usher

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson:

my study anyway.

Two favours I want to ask of you. First, I wish you to get 'Pioneering in New Guinea,' by J. Chalmers. It's a missionary book, and has less pretensions to be literature than Spurgeon's sermons. Yet I think even through that, you will see some of the traits of the hero that wrote it; a man that took me fairly by storm for the most attractive, simple, brave, and interesting man in the whole Pacific. He is away now to go up the Fly River; a desperate venture, it is thought; he is quite a Livingstone card.

Second, try and keep yourself free next winter; and if my

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Koran:

Have ye considered what ye emit?

Do we create it, or are we the creators?

We have decreed amongst you death; but we are not

forestalled from making the likes of you in exchange,

or producing you as ye know not of.

Ye do know the first production-why then do ye not mind?

Have ye considered what ye till?

Do ye make it bear seed, or do we make it bear seed?

If we pleased we could make it mere grit, so that ye

would pause to marvel:

'Verily,we have got into debt and we are excluded.'

The Koran

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 Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy:

saw the straight lines of the shafts which constantly deceived him into thinking they were on a well-travelled road, and the horse's swaying crupper with his knotted tail blown to one side, and farther ahead the high shaft-bow and the swaying head and neck of the horse with its waving mane. Now and then he caught sight of a way-sign, so that he knew they were still on a road and that there was nothing for him to be concerned about.

Vasili Andreevich drove on, leaving it to the horse to keep to the road. But Mukhorty, though he had had a breathing-space in the village, ran reluctantly, and seemed now and then to get

Master and Man