2i8 BOOK OF THE DAMNED 



outlived virtue, or incipient virtue that has not yet established itself, 

 or any other phenomenon that is not in seeming adjustment, har- 

 mony, consistency with a dominant. The astronomers have func- 

 tioned bravely in the past. They've been good for business: the big 

 interests think kindly, if at all, of them. It's bad for trade to have 

 an intense darkness come upon an unaware community and frighten 

 people out of their purchasing values. But if an obscuration be 

 foretold, and if it then occur may seem a little uncanny only a 

 shadow and no one who was about to buy a pair of shoes runs 

 home panic-stricken and saves the money. 



Upon general principles we accept that astronomers have quasi- 

 systematized data of eclipses or have included some and disre- 

 garded others. 



They have done well. 



They have functioned. 



But now they're negatives, or they're out of harmony 



If we are in harmony with a new dominant, or the spirit of a new 

 era, in which Exclusionism must be overthrown; if we have data 

 of many obscurations that have occurred, not only upon the moon, 

 but upon our own earth, as convincing of vast intervening bodies, 

 usually invisible, as is any regularized, predicted eclipse. 



One looks up at the sky. 



It seems incredible that, say, at the distance of the moon, there 

 could be, but be invisible, a solid body, say the size of the moon. 



One looks up at the moon, at a time when only a crescent of it 

 is visible. The tendency is to build up the rest of it in one's mind ; 

 but the unillumined part looks as vacant as the rest of the sky, and 

 it's of the same blueness as the rest of the sky. There's a vast area 

 of solid substance before one's eyes. It's indistinguishable from the 

 sky. 



In some of our little lessons upon the beauties of modesty and 

 humility, we have picked out basic arrogances tail of a peacock, 

 horns of a stag, dollars of a capitalist eclipses of astronomers. 

 Though I have no desire for the job, I'd engage to list hundreds of 

 instances in which the report upon an expected eclipse has been 

 "sky overcast" or "weather unfavorable." In our Super-Hibernia, 

 the unfavorable has been construed as the favorable. Some time 

 ago, when we were lost, because we had not recognized our own 

 dominant, when we were still of the unchosen and likely to be more 

 malicious than we now are because we have noted a steady toler- 

 ance creeping into our attitude if astronomers are not to blame, 



