The Book of the Damned

A great difficulty in trying to understand vast constructions that show no interest in us: The notion that we must be interesting. I accept that, though we're usually avoided, probably for moral reasons, sometimes this earth has been visited by explorers. I think that the notion that there have been extra-mundane visitors to China, within what we call the historic period, will be only ordinarily absurd, when we come to that datum. I accept that some of the other worlds are of conditions very similar to our own. I think of others that are very different--so that visitors from them could not live here--without artificial adaptations. How some of them could breathe our attenuated air, if they came from a gelatinous atmosphere-- Masks. The masks that have been found in ancient deposits. Most of them are of stone, and are said to have been ceremonial regalia of savages-- But the mask that was found in Sullivan County, Missouri, in 1879 (American Antiquarian, 3-336). It is made of iron and silver. 11 One of the damnedest in our whole saturnalia of the accursed-- Because it is hopeless to try to shake off an excommunication only by saying that we're damned by blacker things than ourselves; and that the damned are those who admit they're of the damned. Inertia and hypnosis are too strong for us. We say that: then we go right on admitting we're of the damned. It is only by being more nearly real that we can sweep away the quasi-things that oppose us. Of course, as a whole, we have considerable amorphousness, but we are thinking now of "individual" acceptances. Wideness is an aspect of Universalness or Realness. If our syntheses disregard fewer data than do opposing syntheses--which are often not syntheses at all, but mere consideration of some one circumstance--less widely synthetic things fade away before us. Harmony is an aspect of the Universal, by which we mean Realness. If we approximate more highly to harmony among the parts of an expression and to all available circumstances of an occurrence, the self-contradictors turn hazy. Solidity is an aspect of realness. We pile them up, and we pile them up, or they pass and pass and pass: things that bulk large as they march by, supporting and solidifying one another--