BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



CHAPTER I 



A PROCESSION of the damned. 

 By the damned, I mean the excluded. 



We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded. 



Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have 

 exhumed, will march. You'll read them or they'll march. Some 

 of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten. 



Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, totter- 

 ing, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There 

 are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things 

 that are theorems and things that are rags: they'll go by like 

 Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there 

 will flit little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the 

 highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches 

 and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims 

 and amiabilities. The nai've and the pedantic and the bizarre and 

 the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and 

 the puerile. , 



A stab and a laugh and the patiently folded hands of hopeless 

 propriety. 



The ultra-respectable, but the condemned, anyway. 



The aggregate appearance is of dignity and dissoluteness: the ag- 

 gregate voice is a defiant prayer: but the spirit of the whole ; s pro- 

 cessional. 



The power that has said to all these things that they are damned, 

 is Dogmatic Science. 



But they'll march. 



The little harlots will caper, and freaks will distract attention, 

 and the clowns will break the rhythm of the whole with their buf- 

 fooneries but the solidity of the procession as a whole: the im- 

 pressiveness of things that pass and pass and pass, and keep on and 

 keep on and keep on coming. 



