Benjamin de Casseres
NONSENSE is a fine art.
It is a great antidote to the Tower of Babel, which is the great symbol of man’s devitalizing seriousness.
The secret of the tremendous hold of the “movies” on people is rooted in their sheer nonsense. They are the necessary antidote to the hours piled on hours of common sense that we must hold like a loaded pistol pointed at the world in our struggle for existence.
Open the valves of nonsense. It is the topsy-turvy Castle in the Air. It is a fairy land that the most hopelessly grown-up among us can enter.
Nonsense is a break in order, a sudden break in the chain of cause and effect, that old leaden chain that wears us down with the eternal inevitability.
A nonsensical word, a nonsensical idea, a nonsensical situation causes a sudden explosion in us like the dropping of a bomb filled with the laughter of the fairies in the tired trenches of the brain.
Nonsensical literature is a storehouse of wisdom. It is of the wisdom that isn’t wise. There is more wisdom in the adventures of “Alice in Wonderland” than in all the lamentations of old grouch Solomon. Reason sees her old wrinkles turn to creased and illuminating laughter.
In our strenuous American life to-day there isn’t enough of the spirit of waggery and tomfoolery. Horse-play is not necessarily nonsense. It is generally vulgar, and the true God of Nonsense is not vulgar. He is even intellectual.
Many believe “Don Quixote” to be the greatest book ever written. Well, it is the finest bit of intellectual nonsense ever penned.
Be Don Quixote one hour each day. Charge windmills, wear your mantle of humbug unashamedly.
On the higher levels, Chesterton and Shaw have opened the sparkling Burgundy of Nonsense. On the popular level, we have Charlie Chaplin—a very genius of clownish nonsense!
Salute the great god, Bunk.
Get the nonsense habit! Let the keen air of a little humbug in on your steam-heated grouch!
Original publication
Benjamin de Casseres, “Get the Nonsense Habit,” Red Cross Magazine, October 1920, p. 26. The imprint instead reads August 1920, vol. 16, no. 8.