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The Book of the Damned
·
Charles Fort
134
The
trouble
with
efficiency
is
that
it
will
merge
away
into
excess.
With
what
seems
to
me
to
be
super-abundance
of
convincingness,
Mr.
Symons
then
lugs
another
character
into
his
little
comedy:
That
it
was
all
a
hoax
by
a
chemist's
pupil,
who
had
filled
a
capsule
with
an
explosive,
and
"during
the
storm
had
thrown
the
burning
mass
into
the
gutter,
so
making
an
artificial
thunderbolt."
Or
even
Shakespeare,
with
all
his
inartistry,
did
not
lug
in
King
Lear
to
make
Hamlet
complete.
Whether
I'm
lugging
in
something
that
has
no
special
meaning,
myself,
or
not,
I
find
that
this
storm
of
June
30,
1866,
was
peculiar.
It
is
described
in
the
London
Times,
July
2,
1866:
that
"during
the
storm,
the
sky
in
many
places
remained
partially
clear
while
hail
and
rain
were
falling."
That
may
have
more
meaning
when
we
take
up
the
possible
extra-mundane
origin
of
some
hailstones,
especially
if
they
fall
from
a
cloudless
sky.
Mere
suggestion,
not
worth
much,
that
there
may
have
been
falls
of
extra-mundane
substances,
in
London,
June
30,
1866.
Clinkers,
said
to
have
fallen,
during
a
storm,
at
Kilburn,
July
5,
1877:
According
to
the
Kilburn
Times,
July
7,
1877,
quoted
by
Mr.
Symons,
a
street
had
been
"literally
strewn,"
during
the
storm,
with
a
mass
of
clinkers,
estimated
at
about
two
bushels:
sizes
from
that
of
a
walnut
to
that
of
a
man's
hand--"pieces
of
the
clinkers
can
be
seen
at
the
Kilburn
Times
office."
If
these
clinkers,
or
cinders,
were
refuse
from
one
of
the
super-mercantile
constructions
from
which
coke
and
coal
and
ashes
occasionally
fall
to
this
earth,
or,
rather,
to
the
Super-Sargasso
Sea,
from
which
dislodgment
by
tempests
occurs,
it
is
intermediatistic
to
accept
that
they
must
merge
away
somewhere
with
local
phenomena
of
the
scene
of
precipitation.
If
a
red-hot
stove
should
drop
from
a
cloud
into
Broadway,
someone
would
find
that
at
about
the
time
of
the
occurrence,
a
moving
van
had
passed,
and
that
the
moving
men
had
tired
of
the
stove,
or
something--that
it
had
not
been
really
red-hot,
but
had
been
rouged
instead
of
blacked,
by
some
absent-minded
housekeeper.
Compared
with
some
of
the
scientific
explanations
that
we
have
encountered,
there's
considerable
restraint,
I
think,
in
that
one.
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