The Book of the Damned

Charles Fort

Description

Originally published in 1919, “The Book of the Damned” was the first non-fiction work published by American author Charles Fort. It explores different types of inexplicable phenomena ranging from UFOs and strange weather to disappearing people, cryptozoology, and much more. A fascinating book that challenges the boundaries of accepted scientific knowledge, “The Book of the Damned” is not to be missed by those with an interest in the strange and unexplained. Charles Hoy Fort (1874–1932) was an American writer and researcher most famous for his work relating to anomalous phenomena. His books were popular when first published and are still in print today, having inspired countless “Forteans” and influenced numerous aspects of science fiction. Other notable works by this author include: “New Lands” (1923), “Lo!” (1931), and “Wild Talents” (1932). Read & Co. Books is proudly republishing this classic work now in a new edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

Sujets

• Anomalistics
• Anomaly

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 08 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528791298
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED
By
CHARLES FORT

First published in 1919



Copyright © 2020 Read & Co. Books
This edition is published by Read & Co. Books, an imprint of Read & Co.
This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd. For more information visit www.readandcobooks.co.uk


Contents
Charles Fort
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28



Charles Fort
Charles Hoy Fort was born in Albany, New York, USA in 1874. In his youth, he was a budding naturalist, collecting sea shells, minerals, and birds. At the age of eighteen, he left New York on a world tour, travelling through the western United States, Scotland, England, and South Africa. Around 1900, Fort moved to London, England with his wife, where he began to focus on his writing.
Fort penned a total of ten novels, although only one, The Outcast Manufacturers (1909), was published. In 1915, Fort began to write two books, titled X and Y , the first dealing with the idea that beings on Mars were controlling events on Earth, and the second with the postulation of a sinister civilization living at the South Pole. In 1919, he published his breakout work, which set the tone for the rest of his writing career: The Book of the Damned. The book was a compendium of "damned" data – phenomena for which science could not account and thus rejected or ignored.
Fort spent the rest of his writing career describing such supposedly unexplained occurrences, conducting most of his research in the public libraries of New York and London. Aside from The Book of the Damned (1919), his best-known works are New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932). Examples covered in Fort's work include such things as teleportation, poltergeists, falls of frogs, unaccountable noises and explosions, spontaneous fires, levitation, unidentified flying objects and giant wheels of light in the oceans.
Towards the end of his life, Fort established a large cult following. His style of writing was unusual, blending sensationalism with ambiguity and mocking. Many modern readers see him as first and foremost a satirist, others little more than a purveyor of pseudo-science. Today, the terms Fortean and Forteana are still used to describe the sort of supposedly anonymous phenomena he documented in his writing. Charles Fort died in 19 32, aged 57.



The formatting of the following reflects the original text.


THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED


CHAPTER 1
A procession of the damned.
By the damned, I mean t he excluded.
We shall have a procession of data that Science h as excluded.
Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them—or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten.
Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags: they'll go by like Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naïve and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile.
A stab and a laugh and the patiently folded hands of hopeles s propriety.
The ultra-respectable, but the condem ned, anyway.
The aggregate appearance is of dignity and dissoluteness: the aggregate voice is a defiant prayer: but the spirit of the whole is p rocessional.
The power that has said to all these things that they are damned, is Dogma tic Science.
But th ey'll march.
The little harlots will caper, and freaks will distract attention, and the clowns will break the rhythm of the whole with their buffooneries—but the solidity of the procession as a whole: the impressiveness of things that pass and pass and pass, and keep on and keep on and kee p on coming.
The irresistibleness of things that neither threaten nor jeer nor defy, but arrange themselves in mass-formations that pass and pass and keep on passing.
* * * * *
So, by the damned, I mean t he excluded.
But by the excluded I mean that which will some day be th e excluding.
Or everything that i s, won't be.
And everything that isn 't, will be—
But, of course, will be that whi ch won't be—
It is our expression that the flux between that which isn't and that which won't be, or the state that is commonly and absurdly called "existence," is a rhythm of heavens and hells: that the damned won't stay damned; that salvation only precedes perdition. The inference is that some day our accursed tatterdemalions will be sleek angels. Then the sub-inference is that some later day, back they'll go whenc e they came.
* * * * *
It is our expression that nothing can attempt to be, except by attempting to exclude something else: that that which is commonly called "being" is a state that is wrought more or less definitely proportionately to the appearance of positive difference between that which is included and that which is excluded.
But it is our expression that there are no positive differences: that all things are like a mouse and a bug in the heart of a cheese. Mouse and a bug: no two things could seem more unlike. They're there a week, or they stay there a month: both are then only transmutations of cheese. I think we're all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of an all-inclu sive cheese.
Or that red is not positively different from yellow: is only another degree of whatever vibrancy yellow is a degree of: that red and yellow are continuous, or that they merg e in orange.
So then that, if, upon the basis of yellowness and redness, Science should attempt to classify all phenomena, including all red things as veritable, and excluding all yellow things as false or illusory, the demarcation would have to be false and arbitrary, because things colored orange, constituting continuity, would belong on both sides of the attempted borderline.
As we go along, we shall be impresse d with this:
That no basis for classification, or inclusion and exclusion, more reasonable than that of redness and yellowness has ever been c onceived of.
Science has, by appeal to various bases, included a multitude of data. Had it not done so, there would be nothing with which to seem to be. Science has, by appeal to various bases, excluded a multitude of data. Then, if redness is continuous with yellowness: if every basis of admission is continuous with every basis of exclusion, Science must have excluded some things that are continuous with the accepted. In redness and yellowness, which merge in orangeness, we typify all tests, all standards, all means of forming an opinion—
Or that any positive opinion upon any subject is illusion built upon the fallacy that there are positive differences to judge by—
That the quest of all intellection has been for something—a fact, a basis, a generalization, law, formula, a major premise that is positive: that the best that has ever been done has been to say that some things are self-evident—whereas, by evidence we mean the support of som ething else—
That this is the quest; but that it has never been attained; but that Science has acted, ruled, pronounced, and condemned as if it had be en attained.
What is a house?
It is not possible to say what anything is, as positively distinguished from anything else, if there are no positive differences.
A barn is a house, if one lives in it. If residence constitutes houseness, because style of architecture does not, then a bird's nest is a house: and human occupancy is not the standard to judge by, because we speak of dogs' houses; nor material, because we speak of snow houses of Eskimos—or a shell is a house to a hermit crab—or was to the mollusk that made it—or things seemingly so positively different as the White House at Washington and a shell on the seashore are seen to be continuous.
So no one has ever been able to say what electricity is, for instance. It isn't anything, as positively distinguished from heat or magnetism or life. Metaphysicians and theologians and biologists have tried to define life. They have failed, because, in a positive sense, there is nothing to define: there is no phenomenon of life that is not, to some degree, manifest in chemism, magnetism, astrono mic motions.
White coral islands in a da rk blue sea.
Their seeming of distinctness: the seeming of individuality, or of positive difference one from another—but all are only projections from the same sea bottom. The differen