The Book of the Damned

But data we shall have of round worlds and spindle-shaped worlds, and worlds shaped like a wheel; worlds like titanic pruning hooks; worlds linked together by streaming filaments; solitary worlds, and worlds in hordes: tremendous worlds and tiny worlds: some of them made of material like the material of this earth; and worlds that are geometric super-constructions made of iron and steel-- Or not only fall from the sky of ashes and cinders and coke and charcoal and oily substances that suggest fuel--but the masses of iron that have fallen upon this earth. Wrecks and flotsam and fragments of vast iron constructions-- Or steel. Sooner or later we shall have to take up an expression that fragments of steel have fallen from the sky. If fragments not of iron, but of steel have fallen upon this earth-- But what would a deep-sea fish learn even if a steel plate of a wrecked vessel above him should drop and bump him on the nose? Our submergence in a sea of conventionality of almost impenetrable density. Sometimes I'm a savage who has found something on the beach of his island. Sometimes I'm a deep-sea fish with a sore nose. The greatest of mysteries: Why don't they ever come here, or send here, openly? Of course there's nothing to that mystery if we don't take so seriously the notion--that we must be interesting. It's probably for moral reasons that they stay away--but even so, there must be some degraded ones among them. Or physical reasons: