New Lands

New Lands by Charles Fort
Introduction by Booth Tarkington
[1923]
from http://www.sacred-texts.com/fort/lands/index.htm
INTRODUCTION
BY BOOTH TARKINGTON
Ê
"Personally" (as we are more wont to say in our youth than in any other
ages) I find that a book with an Introduction always worries me a little.
I want to read the book itself, not the Introduction, but for some reason
I have a feeling that it is my unpleasant duty to read the Introduction.
Usually I decide to read the book firs and the Introduction afterward;
but then my reading is tainted throughout by my sense of guilt; for I
have learned by experience that I never do read the Introduction
afterward. So, in time, I have reached the conclusion that an
Introduction ought to inform the reader's mere first glance that he
needn't feel guilty if he doesn't read it afterward. Adopting this view,
the author of the present Introduction finds himself perfectly equipped
for his task. Readers might be made much more uncomfortable if the
Introduction of "New Lands" were what such a book might
conventionally expect: a professionally scientific writer--preferably an
outraged practising astronomer.
A few years ago I had one of those pleasant illnesses that permit the
patient to read in bed for several days without self-reproach; and I sent
down to a bookstore for whatever might be available upon criminals,
crimes and criminology. Among the books brought me in response to
this morbid yearning was one with the title, "The Book of the

Damned."
I opened it, not at the first page, looking for Cartouche Jonathan Wild,
Pranzini, Lacenaire, and read the following passage:
"The fittest survive.
What is meant by the fittest?
Not the strongest; not the cleverest--
Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive.
There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does
survive.
`Fitness' then, is only another name for `survival.'"
Finding no Guiteau or Troppmann here, I let the pages slide under my
fingers and stopped at this:
"My own pseudo-conclusion:
That we've been damned by giants sound asleep, or by great scientific
principles and abstractions that cannot realize themselves: that little
harlots have visited their caprices upon us; that clowns, with buckets of
water from which they pretend to cast thousands of good-sized fishes
have anathemized us for laughing disrespectfully, because, as with all
clowns, underlying buffoonery is the desire to be taken seriously; that
pale ignorances, presiding over microscopes by which they cannot
distinguish flesh from nostoc or fishes' spawn, have visited upon us
their wan solemnities. We've been damned by corpses and skeletons
and mummies, which twitch and totter with pseudo-life derived from
conveniences."
With some astonishment, I continued to dip into the book, sounding it
here and there, but did not bring up even so well-damned a sample of
the bottom as Benedict Arnold. Instead I got these:

"An object from which nets were suspended--
Deflated balloon with its network hanging from it--
A super-dragnet?
That something was trawling overhead?
The birds of Baton Rouge.
I think that we're fished for. It may be we're highly esteemed by
super-epicures somewhere."
..."Melanicus."
That upon the wings of a super-bat, he broods over this earth and over
other worlds, perhaps deriving something from them: hovers on wings
or wing-like appendages, or planes that are hundreds of miles from tip
to tip--a super-evil thing that is exploiting us. By Evil I mean that
which makes us useful."
..."British India Company's steamer Patna, while on a voyage up the
Persian Gulf. In May, 1880, on a dark night about 11:30 P.M. there
suddenly appeared on each side of the ship an enormous luminous
wheel, whirling about, the spokes of which seemed to brush the ship
along...and although the wheels must have been some 500 or 600 yards
in diameter, the spokes could be distinctly see all the way round."
..."I shall have to accept that, floating in the sky of this earth, there are
often fields of ice as extensive as those on the Arctic Ocean--volumes
of water in which there are many fishes and frogs--tracts of land
covered with caterpillars --"
..."Black rains--red rains--the fall of a thousand tons of butter.
Jet black snow--pink snow--blue hailstones--hailstones flavored like
oranges.
Punk and silk and charcoal."

..."A race of tiny beings
They crucified cockroaches.
Exquisite beings --"
But here I turned back to the beginning and read this vigorous and
astounding book straight through, and then re-read it for the pleasure it
gave me in the way of its writing and in the substance of what it told.
DorŽ should have illustrated it, I thought, or Blake. Here indeed was a
"brush dipped in earthquake and eclipse"; though the wildest mundane
earthquakes are but earthquakes in teapots compared to what goes on in
the visions conjured up before us by Mr. Charles Fort.