Good Lord. It's been a month-and-a-half. I thought I was more diligent. Anyway, here's a reprint from a column by Gomer Bath, who wrote for the Peoria, IL, Star. It was reprinted in Doubt.
“Laughing Charles Fort” “‘Progress,’ said Benjamin de Casseres, ‘is nothing but the victory of laughter over dogma.’
“The most civilized erudite and literate laughter at dogma of the present generation was Charles Fort. It should follow, therefore, that the disciples of modern progress hail Charles Fort as their prophet. But I seldom meet a person who responds with any sign of recognition at the mention of the name Fort.
“There may be several reasons for the relative obscurity of this great American thinker, including the fact that he did not seek popular acclaim. One of those reasons, I think, is the failure of Forteans to proclaim Fort’s delightful and malicious sense of humor. I know of no writer of this century who has so joyfully amused himself at the expense of dogmatic wiseacres as Charles Fort. This poking fun at dignity in high places he does with such finesse that a discriminating sense of humor is needed for full appreciation of it. But his delicate laughter is enduring. The reader who finds For in “The Book of the Damned” or any of his other three major works, may be sure that he has discovered a lifetime retreat from the wearying dignity of stuffed shirts. Reading a few pages of Fort almost at random will restore one’s good humor as surely as a cloth restores the polish of a waxed surface.
“One may read logical presentations of, attacks against and defenses of any idea ever known to mankind and find the scales well balanced on controversial questions of the ages. Such is the power of logic that it may defend a false position as ably as attack it. But against the power of laughter there is no defense.
“It is perhaps a god thing that the gift of humor is not widespread. ‘Humor is a divine attribute,” said George Bernard Shaw. Upon but a few is the great gift bestowed. If many possessed it, what we know as order in the world would vanish.
“‘The Book of the Damned’ is about countless things that have happened, things that people have seen, felt and heard, things that have been recorded in newspapers, things that have excited cities and nations (remember the unexplained ‘flying disks’ of the summer of 1947?) but have nevertheless been declared not to have happened. Why? Because they could not be explained by any principles accepted by orthodox science.
“‘A procession of the damned,’ Charles Fort calls these things. “By the damned, I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.”
“And what a procession it is! In the four books (the other three are ‘New Lands,’ ‘Lo!,’ and ‘Wild Talents’) there are 1,062 pages of these unexplained happenings, the data ‘damned’ by science because it would not fit into any of the theories which scientists currently agree are true.
“Science’s ‘seeming approximation to consistency, stability, system--positiveness or realness--is sustained by damning the irreconcilable or the unassimilable,’ says Fort. ‘All would be well. All would be heavenly--if the damned would only stay damned.’
“So Fort spent his life digging up thousands of facts that had not and could not be explained, and writing them with great gusto, poking fun all the while at dogmatic theorists who turned their backs on these facts rather than admit that unexplainable mysteries existed.
“Fort’s books are not attacks on science. They attack the dogmas of science which are held to be final and absolute truths. And in so attacking, Fort proved himself more the true scientist than many scientific bigwigs who scorned him and his work. ‘Certitude is not the test of certainty,’ said Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, himself a Fortean. [Not really, JBB.] ‘We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.’
“And so Charles Fort laughed at dogma and his quiet laughter will echo through the years. And if more people knew of his great sense of humor, the books of Charles Fort would be more widely read than they are.”
“Laughing Charles Fort” “‘Progress,’ said Benjamin de Casseres, ‘is nothing but the victory of laughter over dogma.’
“The most civilized erudite and literate laughter at dogma of the present generation was Charles Fort. It should follow, therefore, that the disciples of modern progress hail Charles Fort as their prophet. But I seldom meet a person who responds with any sign of recognition at the mention of the name Fort.
“There may be several reasons for the relative obscurity of this great American thinker, including the fact that he did not seek popular acclaim. One of those reasons, I think, is the failure of Forteans to proclaim Fort’s delightful and malicious sense of humor. I know of no writer of this century who has so joyfully amused himself at the expense of dogmatic wiseacres as Charles Fort. This poking fun at dignity in high places he does with such finesse that a discriminating sense of humor is needed for full appreciation of it. But his delicate laughter is enduring. The reader who finds For in “The Book of the Damned” or any of his other three major works, may be sure that he has discovered a lifetime retreat from the wearying dignity of stuffed shirts. Reading a few pages of Fort almost at random will restore one’s good humor as surely as a cloth restores the polish of a waxed surface.
“One may read logical presentations of, attacks against and defenses of any idea ever known to mankind and find the scales well balanced on controversial questions of the ages. Such is the power of logic that it may defend a false position as ably as attack it. But against the power of laughter there is no defense.
“It is perhaps a god thing that the gift of humor is not widespread. ‘Humor is a divine attribute,” said George Bernard Shaw. Upon but a few is the great gift bestowed. If many possessed it, what we know as order in the world would vanish.
“‘The Book of the Damned’ is about countless things that have happened, things that people have seen, felt and heard, things that have been recorded in newspapers, things that have excited cities and nations (remember the unexplained ‘flying disks’ of the summer of 1947?) but have nevertheless been declared not to have happened. Why? Because they could not be explained by any principles accepted by orthodox science.
“‘A procession of the damned,’ Charles Fort calls these things. “By the damned, I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.”
“And what a procession it is! In the four books (the other three are ‘New Lands,’ ‘Lo!,’ and ‘Wild Talents’) there are 1,062 pages of these unexplained happenings, the data ‘damned’ by science because it would not fit into any of the theories which scientists currently agree are true.
“Science’s ‘seeming approximation to consistency, stability, system--positiveness or realness--is sustained by damning the irreconcilable or the unassimilable,’ says Fort. ‘All would be well. All would be heavenly--if the damned would only stay damned.’
“So Fort spent his life digging up thousands of facts that had not and could not be explained, and writing them with great gusto, poking fun all the while at dogmatic theorists who turned their backs on these facts rather than admit that unexplainable mysteries existed.
“Fort’s books are not attacks on science. They attack the dogmas of science which are held to be final and absolute truths. And in so attacking, Fort proved himself more the true scientist than many scientific bigwigs who scorned him and his work. ‘Certitude is not the test of certainty,’ said Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, himself a Fortean. [Not really, JBB.] ‘We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.’
“And so Charles Fort laughed at dogma and his quiet laughter will echo through the years. And if more people knew of his great sense of humor, the books of Charles Fort would be more widely read than they are.”
