The Book of the Damned

In general I am accounting for a great deal of this earth's isolation: that it is relatively isolated by circumstances that are similar to the circumstances that make for relative isolation of the bottom of the ocean--except that there is a clumsiness of analogy now. To call ourselves deep-sea fishes has been convenient, but, in a quasi-existence, there is no convenience that will not sooner or later turn awkward--so, if there be denser regions aloft, these regions should now be regarded as analogues of far-submerged oceanic regions, and things coming to this earth would be like things rising to an attenuated medium--and exploding--sometimes incandescently, sometimes with cold light--sometimes non-luminously, like deep-sea fishes brought to the surface--altogether conditions of inhospitality. I have a suspicion that, in their own depths, deep-sea fishes are not luminous. If they are, Darwinism is mere jesuitism, in attempting to correlate them. Such advertising would so attract attention that all advantages would be more than offset. Darwinism is largely a doctrine of concealment: here we have brazen proclamation--if accepted. Fishes in the Mammoth Cave need no light to see by. We might have an expression that deep-sea fishes turn luminous upon entering a less dense medium--but models in the American Museum of Natural History: specialized organs of luminosity upon these models. Of course we do remember that awfully convincing "dodo," and some of our sophistications we trace to him--at any rate disruption is regarded as a phenomenon of coming from a dense to a less dense medium.