The more humble or respectable way to describe both the events Fort
collected and his desire to collect them is to say that Charles Fort was a collector
of coincidences. These were coincidences, however, that he felt—he
could not quite say why—signaled some larger, and perhaps literally cosmic,
truth. He was on the intuitive trail of, well, something. Here is how he
put the matter:
Sometimes I am a collector of data, and only a collector, and am likely to be
gross and miserly, piling up notes, pleased with merely numerically adding to
my store. Other times I have joys, when unexpectedly coming upon an outrageous
story that may not be altogether a lie, or upon a macabre little thing that
may make some reviewer of my more or less good works mad. But always there
is present a feeling of unexplained relations of events that I note; and it is this
far-away, haunting, or often taunting, awareness, or suspicion, that keeps me
piling on. (WT 861–62)
To begin with, in 1901 Fort had already
completed a draft of a youthful autobiography entitled Many Parts, only a
portion of which has survived. The title is from Shakespeare’s famous lines
in As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely
players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time
plays many parts.” As with Shakespeare’s collapsing of the stage into life
and life into the stage (or my earlier discussion of the personality as a persona,
as a “mask”), Fort denied in principle any stable distinction between
fiction and reality. He hated, for example, how books were divided up as
“fiction” or “nonfiction” in the libraries (WT 863).
“I cannot say that truth is stranger than fiction, because I have never had acquaintance with either.”
There is only “the hyphenated state of truth-fiction” (WT 864).
Nor, as we have already noted, did Fort believe in any stable distinction
between the imagined and the physical (WT 1010). As with Myers’s
notion of the imaginal, the imagination, properly understood in its true
scope, is nearly omnipotent in Fort’s worldview. Indeed, it is so powerful
(and potentially perverse) that Fort suggested in more than one context
that we are all living in someone else’s novel, which was not a particularly
good one. “Some of us,” he observed, “seem almost alive—like characters
in something a novelist is writing” (BD 79). There thus can be no final conclusions
or firm beliefs or even arguments “in the fiction that we’re living,”
only what he calls “pseudo-conclusions” and “expressions” (WT 1009).
The world, after all, may be imagined and written anew tomorrow in some
other way, on some other page.