The Book of the Damned

Is contained in

Original title

The Book of the Damned

Original publication date

1919

First words

A procession of the damned.
By the damned, I mean the excluded.

Quotations

It is our expression that the flux between that which isn't and that which won't be, or the state that is commonly and absurdly called "existence," is a rhythm of heavens and hells: that the damned won't stay damned; that sal... (show all)vation only precedes perdition. The inference is that some day our accursed tatterdemalions will be sleek angels. Then the sub-inference is that some later day, back they'll go whence they came.

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I conceive of one inter-continuous nexus, in which and of which all seeming things are only different expressions, but in which all things are localizations of one attempt to break away and become real things, or to establish... (show all) entity or positive difference or final demarcation or unmodified independence—or personality or soul, as it is called in human phenomena—

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Our general expression:

That the state that is commonly and absurdly called "existence," is a flow, or a current, or an attempt, from negativeness to positiveness, and is intermediate to both.

By positiveness we... (show all) mean:

Harmony, equilibrium, order, regularity, stability, consistency, unity, realness, system, government, organization, liberty, independence, soul, self, personality, entity, individuality, truth, beauty, justice, perfection, definiteness—

That all that is called development, progress, or evolution is movement toward, or attempt toward, this state for which, or for aspects of which, there are so many names, all of which are summed up in the one word "positiveness."

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We are not realists. We are not idealists. We are intermediatists—that nothing is real, but that nothing is unreal: that all phenomena are approximations one way or the other between realness and unrealness.

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If all things are of a oneness, which is a state intermediate to unrealness and realness, and if nothing has succeeded in breaking away and establishing entity for itself, and could not continue to "exist" in intermediateness... (show all), if it should succeed, any more than could the born still at the same time be the uterine, I of course know of no positive difference between Science and Christian Science—and the attitude of both toward the unwelcome is the same—"it does not exist."

A Lord Kelvin and a Mrs. Eddy, and something not to their liking—it does not exist.

Of course not, we Intermediates say: but, also, that, in Intermediateness, neither is there absolute non-existence.

Last words

(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)In the Illustrated London News, March 17, 1855, a correspondent from Heidelberg writes, "upon the authority of a Polish Doctor of Medicine," that on the Piashowa-gora (Sand Hill) a small elevation on the border of Galicia, but in Russian Poland, such marks are to be seen in the snow every year, and sometimes in the sand of this hill, and "are attributed by the inhabitants to supernatural influences."

Blurbers

Dreiser, Theodore; Caldwell, Taylor; Thayer, Tiffany; Hecht, Ben

Canonical DDC/MDS

001.94