Odd

“ There are odd corners in the brains of most of us, filled with queer fancies which are as well kept out of sight; eccentricities, I suppose they may be called. The man who is so ‘concentric’ as to be innocent of peculiarities is a companion of a dull sort. But Heaven help us all when such things may be called, and treated as, madness. ”

“ Odd-Fellowship realizes this myth of the pagan gods; she surrounds all her children with her preserving presence, and reveals herself always in the hour of peril, sickness or distress. Nowhere in our country can a true Odd-Fellow feel himself alone, friendless or forsaken. The invisible, but helpful arms of our order surround him wherever he may be. And should he be overtaken by illness or misfortune, be he in any part of the country, and never so poor, he will, if he makes his wants known, receive as a right the necessary assistance, and friends to watch over him with fraternal solicitude. ”

“ These fellows, knowing the extravagant gullibility of the age, set their wits to work in the imagination of improbable possibilities—-of odd accidents, as they term them; but to a reflecting intellect (like mine,” I added, in parenthesis, putting my forefinger unconsciously to the side of my nose,) “to a contemplative understanding such as I myself possess, it seems evident at once that the marvelous increase of late in these ‘odd accidents’ is by far the oddest accident of all. For my own part, I intend to believe nothing henceforward that has anything of the ‘singular’ about it.” ”

“ Odd things happen to all of us on our way through life without our noticing for a time that they have happened. ”

“ The times call for men—broad-browed, clear-eyed, strong-hearted, swift-footed men. Odd-Fellows, not behind you but before you, not in the past but in the future, lies the widest and richest field of Odd-Fellowship's possibility. Turn your faces, not toward the waning light of yesterday, but toward the growing radiance of a better morning. The force is commensurate with the field. The cry of every true Odd-Fellow ought to be the cry that leaped from the heart of Isaiah when his lips were touched with the coal from off the altar: "Here am I, Lord, send me." ”

“ But there are odd stories in real life!—strange pathetic ones, too—stranger, often, than those that found the plot and underplot of a novel or the basis of a poem; but when such men as I come across them they startle us, they look bizarre and unlike all the other leaves of the book that glitter with worldly aphorisms, philosophical maxims, and pungent egotisms, and we would fain cut them out ”

“ This enjoyable appreciation of the odd is in a particularly obvious way subject to the condition of relativity. To begin with, the amusing aspect is determined by, and so strictly relative to the manner of the hour; so that, as the word “antic” shows, the old-fashioned begins to take on an amusing aspect as soon as it is so far displaced by a new custom as to be an out-of-the-way thing.
Again, as already hinted, the odd is always relative to the custom of a locality or a class. A savage and a civilised man alike are wont to laugh at much in the appearance and actions of a foreign people ”

“ My head grovelled in the ashes of an extinguished fire, while my feet reposed upon the wreck of a small table, overthrown, and amid the fragments of a miscellaneous dessert, intermingled with a newspaper, some broken glass and shattered bottles, and an empty jug of the Schiedam Kirschenwasser. Thus revenged himself the Angel of the Odd. ”

“ The word "odd" applied to him peculiarly, which is in itself a sort of social ostracism when attached to any one, and raises a barrier at once between a man and his fellow-bipeds that not even superiority could surmount. ”

“ We went, before dark, through all the natural—as opposed to supernatural—miseries incidental to our state. Dispiriting reports ascended (like the smoke) from the basement in volumes, and descended from the upper rooms. There was no rolling-pin, there was no salamander (which failed to surprise me, for I don’t know what it is) , there was nothing in the house, what there was, was broken, the last people must have lived like pigs, what could the meaning of the landlord be? Through these distresses, the Odd Girl was cheerful and exemplary. ”

“ A man's form may be clothed with rags, his hands may be rough and hard, his cheeks may be browned by the rays of summer's sun; yet underneath all this there may be an honest heart. If so, we take him by the hand and call him brother. Odd-Fellowship teaches equality; we must meet upon one common level. ”

“ The odd Adventures, and Embarrassments, which Persons in real Life are drawn into by their Foibles, are fit Subjects of Mirth.--Whereas in pure Wit, the Allusions are rather surprizing, than mirthful; and the Agreements or Contrasts which are started between Objects, without any relation to the Foibles of Persons in real Life, are more fit to be admired for their Happiness and Propriety, than to excite our Laughter.--Besides, Wit, in the frequent Repetition of it, tires the Imagination with its precipitate Sallies and Flights ”

“ At this moment he started back, with open eyes and gaping mouth:—what an odd thing it is, that the indications of terror are usually ludicrous! ”

“ My dreams were terrifically disturbed by visions of the Angel of the Odd. Methought he stood at the foot of the couch, drew aside the curtains, and, in the hollow, detestable tones of a rum-puncheon, menaced me with the bitterest vengeance for the contempt with which I had treated him. He concluded a long harrangue by taking off his funnelcap, inserting the tube into my gullet, and thus deluging me with an ocean of Kirschenwasser, which he poured, in a continuous flood, from one of the long-necked bottles that stood him instead of an arm. ”

“ The crowd, however, quickly procured and raised a long ladder. By means of this I was descending rapidly, and in apparent safety, when a huge hog, about whose rotund stomach, and indeed about whose whole air and physiognomy, there was something which reminded me of the Angel of the Odd,—when this hog, I say, which hitherto had been quietly slumbering in the mud, took it suddenly into his head that his left shoulder needed scratching, and could find no more convenient rubbing post than that afforded by the foot of the ladder. ”

“ Some were chattering nonsense to invisible persons, others were laughing or crying aimlessly, and one old, gray-haired woman was nudging me, and, with winks and sage noddings of the head and pitiful uplifting of the eyes and hands, was assuring me that I must not mind the poor creatures, as they were all mad. ”

“ You see this Fairy Land is full of oddities and all sorts of incredibly ridiculous things, which a man is compelled to meet and treat as real existences, although all the time he feels foolish for doing so. ”

“ The trick of selecting oddities as a method of characterisation is superficial, simply because oddities lie upon the surface. You can, without much difficulty, construct a dialogue between a blacksmith and a student, showing how the unlettered man exhibits his ignorance and the scholar his taste. ”

“ Thus if any Foible of a Character in real Life is directly attacked, by pointing out the unexpected and ridiculous Affinity it bears to some inanimate Circumstances, this Foible is then ridiculed with Wit, from the Comparison which is made.--At the same time, as the whimsical Oddity of a Character in real Life is the Ground of the whole, there is also Humour contain'd in the Attack. ”

“ The Oddities, when introduced to each other, start back with mutual Astonishment, but after some time from a frequency of seeing, grow into a Coarse Fondness one for the other, expressed by Horse Laughs, or intimated by alternate Thumps on the Back, with all such other gentle insinuations of our uncivilized Male Hoydens. ”

“ Humour is the whimsical Oddity, or Foible, which fairly appears in its Subject, of itself; whereas Wit, is the Lustre which is thrown upon one Subject, by the sudden Introduction of another Subject.
To constitute Humour, there need be no more than one Object concern'd, and this must be always some Person in real Life;--whereas to produce Wit, there must be always two Objects arranged together, and either or both of these may be inanimate. ”

“ “This sensation of listlessness, weariness, stupidity, this disinclination to sit down and employ myself, this feeling of every thing's being dull and insipid about the house!— I must be in love; I should be the oddest creature in the world if I were not—for a few weeks at least. ”

“ I am afraid I shall appear too Abstracted in my Speculations, if I shew that when a Man of Wit makes us laugh, it is by betraying some Oddness or Infirmity in his own Character, or in the Representation which he makes of others ”

“ I beg leave to assure my honored readers that most of the incidents are taken from real life, and that the oddest are the truest; for no person, no matter how vivid an imagination he may have, can invent anything half so droll as the freaks and fancies that originate in the lively brains of little people. ”

“ I have recorded simply a number of features of the shady life and psychology of that people which, while remaining behind the curtain of actuality, nevertheless throws a lurid light upon its mind and gives one more cue as to its true character. ”

“ And then they had a picnic before the fire, and neither said a single word that would not have sounded foolish from the lips of twelve years old—foolish, mind you, not silly; there’s a world of difference between foolish and silly, between folly and flatness. They had a hilariously good time, like the two attractive grown-up children that they were—both brimming with the joy of life, both eager for laughter as only intelligent, imaginative people with no blight of solemn-ass false dignity upon them are. ”

“ The insanity of the King differs widely in its nature from that of the Fool, and that of the Fool from that of the beggar. But the insanity of the King differs from that of the beggar—not only in its nature, but also in the fact that one is real and the other simply a pretence. Are we to suppose then that the insanity of the third character, the Fool, is, in this respect, a mere repetition of that of the second, the beggar,—that it too is mere pretence? ”

“ The contrast would be too painful, the shock too great, but for the intervention of the Fool, whose well-timed levity comes in to break the continuity of feeling when it can no longer be borne, and to bring into play again the fibres of the heart just as they are growing rigid from overstrained excitement. The imagination is glad to take refuge in the half-comic, half-serious comments of the Fool, just as the mind under the extreme anguish of a surgical operation vents itself in sallies of wit. ”

“ A convulsive wave of madness would overwhelm their still limbs. They would jump up, yelling and howling like animals; they would forget that they had wives, sisters, mothers, and would begin casting themselves about like men stricken with sudden blindness, in their madness throttling each other with their white fingers fragrant with scent. ”

“ The little mouth laughed.
"Who are you, seigneur dwarf?" she said.
"Bran is my name, and a man am I, and what is more a fool."
"How are you more than a man?"
"I weep when I laugh and laugh when I weep. I see what is not. What I know that I do not believe." ”

“ That the final glimmer of a tottering reason was fast leaving the poor, aching head she was too young to realise. Madness was a word that had only a vague meaning for her. Though she did not understand her father at the present moment, though she was half afraid of him, she would have rejected with scorn and horror any suggestion that he was mad. ”

“ Imagine a voice that at every turn of the road—especially when you act your grandest, talk your loudest, achieve your highest—that at every turn of the road exclaims: 'How absurd, how silly of you!' Imagine a state of mind when all is farce around you and your own caricature is your constant companion. Such things happen to some people, and to them everything is so unreal, so absurd, so stupid; the greatest events, the sublimest utterances, are ever so laughable. The more seriously the people play their parts the more ridiculous the performance seems. ”

“ But the voices of madmen, even in their wildest paroxysms, are never found to tally with that peculiar voice heard upon the stairs. Madmen are of some nation, and their language, however incoherent in its words, has always the coherence of syllabification. Besides, the hair of a madman is not such as I now hold in my hand. I disentangled this little tuft from the rigidly ​clutched fingers of Madame L'Espanaye. ”

“ It is, indeed, no unusual characteristic of madness to shun, as by a kind of cunning, all mention of the names of those by whom the madness has been caused. It is as if the unfortunates imagined that the madness might be undiscovered if the images connected with it were unbetrayed. ”

“ I FEAR the seemingly incredible story which I am about to relate will be regarded as the result of a distorted intellect superinduced, possibly, by the glamour of unveiling a marvelous mystery, rather than a truthful record of the unparalleled experiences related by one Olaf Jansen, whose eloquent madness so appealed to my imagination that all thought of an analytical criticism has been effectually dispelled. ”

“ The mocking glance, the curve of gentle irony were still there in eyes and mouth, but the nostrils quivered with excitement, with the spirit of adventure which never slept so soundly but that it awakened at a word. ”

“ But there is, in truth, as little of affected as of actual madness in his behaviour in her presence. When he comes before her pale and trembling, speechless and with staring eyes, it is with no simulated insanity, but in the agonized hope, scarce distinguishable from despair, of finding, in the testimony of her visible presence, an assurance that the doubts ever tearing his spirit and sickening his brain, are but the offspring of his phantasy. ”