I S 6 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



selling us cast-off super-fineries, which we'd take to like an African 

 chief to some one's old silk hat from New York or London? 



The answer that occurs to me is so simple that it seems imme- 

 diately acceptable, if we accept that the obvious is the solution of 

 all problems, or if most of our perplexities consist in laboriously and 

 painfully conceiving of the unanswerable, and then looking for 

 answers using such words as "obvious" and "solution" conven- 

 tionally 



Or: 



Would we, if we could, educate and sophisticate pigs, geese, 

 cattle? 



Would it be wise to establish diplomatic relation with the hen 

 that now functions, satisfied with mere sense of achievement by way 

 of compensation? 



I think we're property. 



I should say we belong to something: 



That once upon a time, this earth was No-man's Land, that other 

 worlds explored and colonized here, and fought among themselves 

 for possession, but that now it's owned by something: 



That something owns this earth all others warned off. 



Nothing in our own times perhaps because I am thinking of 

 certain notes I have has ever appeared upon this earth, from some- 

 where else, so openly as Columbus landed upon San Salvador, or as 

 Hudson sailed up his river. But as to surreptitious visits to this 

 earth, in recent times, or as to emissaries, perhaps, from other 

 worlds, or voyagers who have shown every indication of intent to 

 evade and avoid, we shall have data as convincing as our data of 

 oil or coal-burning aerial super-constructions. 



But, in this vast subject, I shall have to do considerable neglecting 

 or disregarding, myself. I don't see how I can, in this book, take 

 up at all the subject of possible use of humanity to some other mode 

 of existence, or the flattering notion that we can possibly be worth 

 something. 



Pigs, geese, and cattle. 

 First find out that they are owned. 

 Then find out the whyness of it. 



I suspect that, after all, we're useful that among contesting 

 claimants, adjustment has occurred, or that something now has a 

 legal right to us, by force, or by having paid out analogues of beads 

 for us to former, more primitive, owners of us all others warned 

 off that all this has been known, perhaps for ages, to certain ones 



