BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness, even 

 though, by physiologic standards, incomplete, she is beautiful. 



A hand thought of only as a hand, may seem beautiful. 



Found on a battlefield obviously a part not beautiful. 



But everything in our experience is only a part of something else 

 that in turn is only a part of still something else or that there is 

 nothing beautiful in our experience: only appearances that are in- 

 termediate to beauty and ugliness that only universality is com- 

 plete: that only the complete is the beautiful: that every attempt 

 to achieve beauty is an attempt to give to the local the attribute of 

 the universal. 



By stability, we mean the immovable and the unaffected. But all 

 seeming things are only reactions to something else. Stability, too, 

 then, can be only the universal, or that besides which there is 

 nothing else. Though some things seem to have or have higher 

 approximations to stability than have others, there are, in our ex- 

 perience, only various degrees of intermediateness to stability and 

 instability. Every man, then, who works for stability under its 

 various names of "permanency," "survival," "duration," is striving 

 to localize in something the state that is realizable only in the uni- 

 versal. 



By independence, entity, and individuality, I can mean only that 

 besides which there is nothing else, if given only two things, they 

 must be continuous and mutually affective, if everything is only a 

 reaction to something else, and any two things would be destructive 

 of each other's independence, entity, or individuality. 



All attempted organizations and systems and consistencies, some 

 approximating far higher than others, but all only intermediate to 

 Order and Disorder, fail eventually because of their relations with 

 outside forces. All are attempted completenesses. If to all local 

 phenomena there are always outside forces, these attempts, too, are 

 realizable only in the state of completeness, or that to which there 

 are no outside forces. 



Or that all these words are synonyms, all meaning the state that 

 we call the positive state 



That our whole "existence" is a striving for the positive state. 



The amazing paradox of it all: 



That all things are trying to become the universal by excluding 

 other things. 



That there is only this one process, and that it does animate all 



