Fort - New Lands

Start Publishing LLC

Copyright 2012 by Start Publishing LLC

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

First Start Publishing eBook edition October 2012

Start Publishing is a registered trademark of Start Publishing LLC

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 978-1-62793-208-0

BY BOOTH TARKINGTON

Personally (as we are more wont to say in our youth than in any other ages) I find that a book with an Introduction always worries me a little. I want to read the book itself, not the Introduction, but for some reason I have a feeling that it is my unpleasant duty to read the Introduction. Usually I decide to read the book firs and the Introduction afterward; but then my reading is tainted throughout by my sense of guilt; for I have learned by experience that I never do read the Introduction afterward. So, in time, I have reached the conclusion that an Introduction ought to inform the readers mere first glance that he neednt feel guilty if he doesnt read it afterward. Adopting this view, the author of the present Introduction finds himself perfectly equipped for his task. Readers might be made much more uncomfortable if the Introduction of New Lands were what such a book might conventionally expect: a professionally scientific writerpreferably an outraged practising astronomer.

A few years ago I had one of those pleasant illnesses that permit the patient to read in bed for several days without self-reproach; and I sent down to a bookstore for whatever might be available upon criminals, crimes and criminology. Among the books brought me in response to this morbid yearning was one with the title, The Book of the Damned.

I opened it, not at the first page, looking for Cartouche Jonathan Wild, Pranzini, Lacenaire, and read the following passage:

The fittest survive.

What is meant by the fittest?

Not the strongest; not the cleverest

Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive.

There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive.

`Fitness then, is only another name for `survival.

Finding no Guiteau or Troppmann here, I let the pages slide under my fingers and stopped at this:

My own pseudo-conclusion:

That weve been damned by giants sound asleep, or by great scientific principles and abstractions that cannot realize themselves: that little harlots have visited their caprices upon us; that clowns, with buckets of water from which they pretend to cast thousands of good-sized fishes have anathemized us for laughing disrespectfully, because, as with all clowns, underlying buffoonery is the desire to be taken seriously; that pale ignorances, presiding over microscopes by which they cannot distinguish flesh from nostoc or fishes spawn, have visited upon us their wan solemnities. Weve been damned by corpses and skeletons and mummies, which twitch and totter with pseudo-life derived from conveniences.

With some astonishment, I continued to dip into the book, sounding it here and there, but did not bring up even so well-damned a sample of the bottom as Benedict Arnold. Instead I got these:

An object from which nets were suspended

Deflated balloon with its network hanging from it

A super-dragnet?

That something was trawling overhead?

The birds of Baton Rouge.

I think that were fished for. It may be were highly esteemed by super-epicures somewhere.

...Melanicus.

That upon the wings of a super-bat, he broods over this earth and over other worlds, perhaps deriving something from them: hovers on wings or wing-like appendages, or planes that are hundreds of miles from tip to tipa super-evil thing that is exploiting us. By Evil I mean that which makes us useful.

...British India Companys steamer Patna, while on a voyage up the Persian Gulf. In May, 1880, on a dark night about 11:30 P.M. there suddenly appeared on each side of the ship an enormous luminous wheel, whirling about, the spokes of which seemed to brush the ship along...and although the wheels must have been some 500 or 600 yards in diameter, the spokes could be distinctly see all the way round.

...I shall have to accept that, floating in the sky of this earth, there are often fields of ice as extensive as those on the Arctic Oceanvolumes of water in which there are many fishes and frogstracts of land covered with caterpillars

...Black rainsred rainsthe fall of a thousand tons of butter.

Jet black snowpink snowblue hailstoneshailstones flavored like oranges.

Punk and silk and charcoal.

...A race of tiny beings

They crucified cockroaches.

Exquisite beings

But here I turned back to the beginning and read this vigorous and astounding book straight through, and then re-read it for the pleasure it gave me in the way of its writing and in the substance of what it told. Dor should have illustrated it, I thought, or Blake. Here indeed was a brush dipped in earthquake and eclipse; though the wildest mundane earthquakes are but earthquakes in teapots compared to what goes on in the visions conjured up before us by Mr. Charles Fort. For he deals in nightmare, not on the planetary, but on the constellational scale, and the imagination of one who staggers along after him is frequently left gasping and flaccid.

Now he has followed The Book of the Damned with New Lands pointing incidentally to Mars as the San Salvador of the Sky, and renewing his passion for the dismayingly significant damned tokens and strange hints excluded by the historically mercurial acceptances of Dogmatic Science. Of his attack on the astronomers it can at least be said that the literature of indignation is enriched by it.

To the university-trained mind here is wildness almost as wild as Roger Bacons once appeared to be; though of course even the layest of lay brothers must not assume that all wild science will in time become accepted law, as some of Rogers did. Retort to Mr. Fort must be left to the outraged astronomer. If indeed any astronomer could feel himself so little outraged as to offer a retort. Lay brethren are outside the quarrel and must content themselves with gratitude to a man who writes two such books as New Lands and The Book of the Damned; gratitude for passages and picturesmoving picturesof such cyclonic activity and dimensions that a whole new area of a readers imagination stirs in amazement and is brought to life.

By Charles Fort

LANDS in the sky

That they are nearby

That they do not move.

I take for a principle that all being is the infinitely serial, and that whatever has been will, with differences of particulars, be again

The last quarter of the fifteenth centuryland to the west!

This first quarter of the twentieth centurywe shall have revelations.

There will be data. There will be many. Behind this book, unpublished collectively, or held as constituting its reserve forces, there are other hundreds of data, but independently I take for a principle that all existence is a flux and a re-flux, by which periods of expansion follow periods of contraction; that few men can even think widely when times are narrow times, but that human constrictions cannot repress extensions of thoughts and lives and enterprise and dominion when times are wider timesso then that the pageantry of foreign coasts that was revealed behind blank horizons after the year 1492, can not be, in the course of development, the only astounding denial of seeming vacancythat the spirit, or the animation, and the stimulations and the needs of the fifteenth century are all appearing again, and that requital may appear again