The Book of the Damned

However, this merger between possible eclipses by unknown dark bodies and commonplace terrestrial phenomena is formidable. As to darknesses that have fallen upon vast areas, conventionality is--smoke from forest fires. In the U.S. Forest Service Bulletin, No. 117, F.G. Plummer gives a list of eighteen darknesses that have occurred in the United States and Canada. He is one of the primitives, but I should say that his dogmatism is shaken by vibrations from the new Dominant. His difficulty, which he acknowledges, but which he would have disregarded had he written a decade or so earlier, is the profundity of some of these obscurations. He says that mere smokiness cannot account for such "awe-inspiring dark days." So he conceives of eddies in the air, concentrating the smoke from forest fires. Then, in the inconsistency or discord of all quasi-intellection that is striving for consistency or harmony, he tells of the vastness of some of these darknesses. Of course Mr. Plummer did not really think upon this subject, but one does feel that he might have approximated higher to real thinking than by speaking of concentration and then listing data of enormous area, or the opposite of circumstances of concentration--because, of his nineteen instances, nine are set down as covering all New England. In quasi-existence, everything generates or is part of its own opposite. Every attempt at peace prepares the way for war; all attempts at justice result in injustice in some other respect: so Mr. Plummer's attempt to bring order into his data, with the explanation of darkness caused by smoke from forest fires, results in such confusion that he ends up by saying that these daytime darknesses have occurred "often with little or no turbidity of the air near the earth's surface"--or with no evidence at all of smoke--except that there is almost always a forest fire somewhere.