Today's Stichomancy for Philip K. Dick

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad:

"There was some little dispute about it. Our chaps took offense. `As if we would harbor a thing like that,' they said. `Wouldn't you like to look for him in our coal-hole?' Quite a tiff. But they made it up in the end. I suppose he did drown himself. Don't you, sir?"

"I don't suppose anything."

"You have no doubt in the matter, sir?"

"None whatever."

I left him suddenly. I felt I was producing a bad impression, but with my double down there it was most trying to be on deck. And it was almost as trying to be below. Altogether a nerve-trying situation.

The Secret Sharer

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw:

I love to hear her speak; yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound. I grant I never saw a goddess go: My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground. And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare. Take this as a sample of the sort of compliment from which she was never for a moment safe with Shakespear. Bear in mind that she was not a comedian; that the Elizabethan fashion of treating brunettes as ugly woman must have made her rather sore on the subject of her

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

And among the story-tellers; And in Winter, when the snow-flakes Whirl in eddies round the lodges, When the wind in gusty tumult O'er the smoke-flue pipes and whistles, "There," they cry, "comes Pau-Puk-Keewis, He is dancing through the village, He is gathering in his harvest!"

XVIII

The Death of Kwasind

Far and wide among the nations

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 Alexander's Bridge by Willa Cather:

become slightly deranged upon the subject of the fourth dimension. On other matters he was perfectly rational and he was easy and pleasing in conversation. He looked very much like Agassiz, and his wife, in her old-fashioned black silk dress, overskirted and tight-sleeved, reminded Alexander of the early pictures of Mrs. Browning. Hilda seemed particularly fond of this quaint couple, and Bartley himself was so pleased with their mild and thoughtful converse that he took his

Alexander's Bridge