Benjamin De Casseres wrote books on Shaw and Emerson, contributed copiously to magazines, played Super-Checkers with Charles Fort, went on drinking sprees with Don Marquis. He summed up his attitude like this: “Hope the whore and Knowledge her pimp were not motived profoundly enough in my nature to save me from death. Only thee, Alcohol, Debauchery, and Crazy Laughter were my saviors, my Rock, my Gates Ajar.”
He kept a sort of diary and/or workbook, from 1925 until his death in 1945. He called it “Fantasia Impromptu: The Adventures of an Intellectual Faun,” and described it as “an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual autobiography.” It contains his daily accumulation of notes on people, thoughts while shaving, records of parties and nights on the town, epigrams, and squibs. The manuscript now slumbers in the New York Public Library, undisturbed by its intended readers, “the thinkers, poets, satirists, individualists, dare-devils, egoists, satanists and godolepts of posterity.”
He did, however, privately publish six booklets of excerpts. Here are some samples.
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An artist who has not venom in his nature is like Prometheus without his curses.
What is progress? — the victory of humor over dogma.
I have friends who buy and read every current book about which the publishers and reviewers make a noise. It is just as if I bought the whole cart of vegetables from our Billy the Huckster every time I heard his bawling under the window.
Perfect, unruffled love can only exist between two imbeciles.
We live two lives; the one we live and the one we missed.
Children of accident may be excused, but to plan deliberately to bring children into the world has always seemed to me a form of murder.
You will notice that in the phrase “petty thief,” the word that is stressed with contempt is “petty,” not “thief.”
Man is always in the attitude of raising his hands toward heaven in prayer because he instinctively feels the need of handcuffs.
Why is Wisdom always conceived as being calm, poised? Why do sculptors always make Wisdom and Wise Men beings that are aloof, serene, old? Wisdom is tragic. Wisdom is disillusion. Wisdom is hell! Wisdom is not Minerva. It is Gorgon.
I laugh at my certainties. I laugh at my uncertainties. Therefore I weep.
Dear Ben: We both peeped over your shoulder as you wrote the above paragraphs on time, space, and existence. You are not quite right, but to tell you the truth would cause an explosion in your brain and kill you, and we do not wish that as yet, for reasons best known to us both. But, my dear boy, you are so nearly right, you are so clearly on the right track, that we are both admiringly fearful. God & Satan.
(Posted by Doug Skinner)