The Book of the Damned

The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort Page A

Book: The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort Read Free Book Online
Authors: Charles Fort
Ads: Link
as a table-top.
    “The mass was damp and smelt disagreeably, like rotten seaweed, but, when dried, the smell went off.”
    “It tore fibrously, like paper.”
    Classic explanation:
    “Up from one place, and down in another.”
    But what went up, from one place, in a whirlwind? Of course, our Intermediatist acceptance is that had this been the strangest substance conceivable, from the strangest other world that could be thought of; somewhere upon this earth there must be a substance similar to it, or from which it would, at least subjectively, or according to description, not be easily distinguishable. Or that everything in New York City is only another degree or aspect of something, or combination of things, in a village of Central Africa. The novel is a challenge to vulgarization: write something that looks new to you: someone will point out that the thrice-accursed Greeks said it long ago. Existence is Appetite: the gnaw of being; the one attempt of all things to assimilate all other things, if they have not surrendered and submitted to some higher attempt. It was cosmic that these scientists, who had surrendered to and submitted to the Scientific System, should, consistently with the principles of that system, attempt to assimilate the substance that fell at Memel with some known terrestrial product. At the meeting of the Royal Irish Academy it was brought out that there is a substance, of rather rare occurrence, that has been known to form in thin sheets upon marsh land.
    It looks like greenish felt.
    The substance of Memel:
    Damp, coal-black, leafy mass.
    But, if broken up, the marsh-substance is flake-like, and it tears fibrously.
    An elephant can be identified as a sunflower—both have long stems. A camel is indistinguishable from a peanut—if only their humps be considered.
    Trouble with this book is that we’ll end up a lot of intellectual roués: we’ll be incapable of being astonished with anything. We knew, to start with, that science and imbecility are continuous; nevertheless so many expressions of the merging-point are at first startling. We did think that Prof. Hitchcock’s performance in identifying the Amherst phenomenon as a fungus was rather notable as scientific vaudeville, if we acquit him of the charge of seriousness—or that, in a place where fungi were so common that, before a given evening two of them sprang up, only he, a stranger in this very fungiferous place, knew a fungus when he saw something like a fungus—if we disregard its quick liquefaction, for instance. It was only a monologue, however: now we have an all-star cast: and they’re not only Irish; they’re royal Irish.
    The royal Irishmen excluded “coal-blackness” and included fibrousness: so then that this substance was “marsh paper,” which “had been raised into the air by storms of wind, and had again fallen.”
    Second act:
    It was said that, according to M. Ehrenberg, “the meteor paper was found to consist partly of vegetable matter, chiefly of conifervae.”
    Third act:
    Meeting of the royal Irishmen: chairs, tables, Irishmen:
    Some flakes of marsh-paper were exhibited.
    Their composition was chiefly of conifervae.
    This was a double inclusion: or it’s the method of agreement that logicians make so much of. So no logician would be satisfied with identifying a peanut as a camel, because both have humps: he demands accessory agreement—that both can live a long time without water, for instance.
    Now, it’s not so very unreasonable, at least to the free and easy vaudeville standards that, throughout this book, we are considering, to think that a green substance could be snatched up from one place in a whirlwind, and fall as a black substance somewhere else: but the royal Irishmen excluded something else, and it is a datum that was as accessible to them as it is to me:
    That, according to Chladni, this was no little, local deposition that was seen to occur by some indefinite person living near a pond

Similar Books

Murder Under Cover

Kate Carlisle

Noble Warrior

Alan Lawrence Sitomer

McNally's Dilemma

Lawrence Sanders, Vincent Lardo

The President's Vampire

Christopher Farnsworth