a public post for once, after all the friends-only ones

The discussion on crowleycrow LJ of "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout" has revealed the sheer variety of versions of this anecdote that exist on the Web. I am still ninety per cent certain that it was William James who wrote down this remarkable revelation of the secret of the universe just before lapsing into unconsciousness in experiments with ether (unless it was nitrous oxide) but in that case we need a reliable textual source, which we do not have. Surely someone out there with university connections can log onto a William James searchable database and produce chapter and verse?

The round robin of slowly altering anecdotes is nothing short of remarkable. (Bertrand Russell told the story with the punchline above, rather than "A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout," a common variant, and ascribed it to an anonymous individual; there is at least one website on which it has become Russell who had the experience, and the revelation was another commonly cited quotation).

Oral cultures are said by some to preserve, rather than alter, transmitted sayings. Presumably (just as Plato's Socrates tells us that Thamus predicted when Thoth invented writing), when literate individuals transmit the stories they remember, they show that their capacity to recall things accurately has gone to hell in a handbasket. (I had to look up the passage from Plato because, well, I only semi-remembered it and had thought it was in the Hermetic writings where one would expect to find a story about Thoth.)

the odor of sanctity and turpentine: a footnote for crowleycrow

"A strong smell of turpentine prevails ( throughout." )

hogmanay, higmanay...no, actually....

Having confidently asserted that now that I have found the most likely origin of the revelation under ether "A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout," someone else would have to track down the real origin of the "Hogamus higamus" nonsense verse, I of course began searching.

And have found nothing reliable re that, but have now realized that the author of "Notes in the Night," to which I refer in the original thread of comments on crowleycrow, is almost certainly the prolific humorist H. Allen Smith, whose How to Write Without Knowing Nothing gave me great delight when I was fourteen years old (I didn't understand the dirty parts). An attempt to confirm this brought up one of Smith's books of which I had had no prior knowledge, Lo, the Former Egyptian! (which led one fan to begin her post on a Smith chat site, "being a former Egyptian myself...."). Rather than having anything to do with Egypt, the book, according to its cover, is one in which the author "revisits the scenes of his childhood."

The collector who maintains an H. Allen Smith site that, mysteriously, does not document How to Write Without Knowing Nothing, quotes a passage from Lo, the Former Egyptian! that is very odd, because unless the subsequent punchline has been withheld, it isn't funny at all. And I quote:

"From page 12:
A man sitting quietly before his fire may be at peace, but he is not at rest. If he sits long enough:
1) He turns a gigantic somersault, once every 24 hours, because of the earth's daily rotation on its axis. If he lives half way between the North Pole and the Equator, this motion carries him along at some 700 miles per hour.
2) The earth's annual revolution around the sun swings him in an orbit nearly 200,000,000 miles across at a speed of 18 miles per second.
3) The movement of the whole solar system relative to neighbor stars takes him in the direction of Vega at about 12 miles per second.
4) The whole galaxy to which the sun and all other visible stars belong - the Milky Way- appears to be slowly rotating. Various regions in this great disk, six hundred thousand trillion miles across, rotate at different speeds. Mr. sit-by-the-fire swings around the centre of the Milky Way at 170 miles per second."

What I would like to know is why our aforementioned aficionado chose just this passage to quote and no others.

Smith's 1962 autobiography, which one fan says is most memorable for its account of his early life in Huntington, Indiana, is titled To Hell in a Handbasket. He wrote one fantasy novel, about a future time in which people are born with tails.