In the second part of our series on Charles Hoy Fort, we first
return to the formative events of his adolescence that shaped his
personality, career, and personal philosophies. Fort chronicled
anecdotes from his youth in an unpublished manuscript titled Many
Parts, written while in his 20s and of which only fragments
remain. What can be gleaned from tales of his boisterous boyhood
adventures, punctuated by harsh punishments from a strict father,
is that it all instilled in Fort defiance of rules, dogma, and
the expectations of hallowed establishments. He struggled to make
sense of a childhood world that seemed rife with capricious
events and outcomes, much as he later struggled to make sense of
an adult world peppered with anomalous occurrences and their
close-minded dismissal. We then examine Fort's journey from
middle age to the end and his mindset towards and relationship
with strange evidence. Just as he had been since he was a kid,
Fort remained a collector. First of birds and rocks, then later
stories of things that shouldn't happen yet still seemed to. And
just as he had lost interest in labeling his natural finds in his
teens, Fort perhaps lost interest in defining the enigmas he
gathered and instead focused not on the labels and definitions
but on the meaning and mechanics behind them. As much as Fort
proved to be a "fly in the ointment" to hubristic scientists,
critics, and clergy alike, his point was that the events
themselves remained even more problematic, or as he wrote, "They
will march." We must accept that the weirdness of our reality
defies absolute conclusions. As we've also found with our
research, any judgments on the impossible essentially boil down
to belief. Or, as Fort summed up, "Here are the data. Make what
you will, yourself, of them. . . . We have expressions: we don't
call them explanations. We've discarded explanations with
beliefs." If there is any conclusion we perhaps share with
Charles Fort, it is this: if the paranormal and the supernatural
genuinely exist, it certainly doesn't care what anyone
believes.
Visit our webpage for this episode for a lot more information!
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