- Al Jolson

Lewis Carroll's Alice think's it nonsense when the March Hare offers her nonexistent wine, or when the White King admires her ability to see nobody on the road and wonders why nobody did not arrive ahead of the March Hare because nobody goes faster than the hare.

Consider Holes. An old riddle asks how much dirt is in a rectangular hole of certain dimensions. Although the hole has all the properties of a rectangular parallelepiped (corners, edges, faces with areas, volume, and so on), the answer is that there is no dirt in the hole.

In Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, the braided man, who lives on Pyramid Mountain in the earth's interior, tells Dorothy how he got there. He had been a manufacturer of holes for Swiss cheese, doughnuts, buttons, porous plasters, and other things. One day he decided to store a vast quantity of adjustable postholes by placing them end to end in the ground, making a deep vertical shaft into which he accidentally tumbled.

There are many outstanding instances of nothing in print: Chapters 18 and 19 of the final volume of Tristram Shandy, for example. Elbert Hubbard's Essay on Silence, containing only blank pages, was bound in brown suede and gold-stamped.

There have been books titled "What I Know about Women", and a Protestant fundamentalist tract called "What Must You Do to Be Lost?" Poeme Collectif, by Robert Filliou, issued in Belgium in 1968, consisting of sixteen blank pages.

In 1974 "The Nothing Book" a volume of blank pages was published by Harmony House, in regular and deluxe editions. It sold so well that in 1975 an even more expensive (five dollars) deluxe edition was printed on fine French marble design paper and bound in leather.

Nothing has long been a favorite topic of song writers: "I ain't got nobody," "Nobody loves me," "I've got plenty of nothing," "Nobody lied when they said that I cried over you," "There ain't no sweet gal that's worth the salt of my tears," and hundreds of other lines.

An old joke tells of a man who slept in a lighthouse under a foghorn that boomed regularly every ten minutes. One night at 3:20 A.M., when the mechanism failed, the man leaped out of bed shouting, "What was that?"

As a prank all the members of a large orchestra once stopped playing suddenly in the middle of a strident symphony, causing the conductor to fall off the podium.

One afternoon in a rural section of North Dakota, where the wind blew constantly, there was a sudden cessation of wind. All the chickens fell over.

There is an old joke about a jukebox that offers, for a quarter, to provide three minutes of no music.

The fact that we ourselves will soon vanish is real enough. In medieval times the fear of death was mixed with a fear of eternal suffering, but since the fading of hell (albeit it is now enjoying a renaissance) this fear has been replaced by what Soren Kierkegaard called an "anguish" or "dread" over the possibility of becoming nothing.

When the train platform on Third Avenue in New York was torn down, police began receiving phone calls from people who lived near it. They were waking at regular intervals during the night, hearing strange noises, and having strong feelings of foreboding. The schedules of the absent trains, reappeared in the form of patterned calls on the police blotters.

Philipp Mainlander imagined that we are fragments of a God who destroyed Himself at the beginning of time, because he did not wish to exist. Universal history is the obscure agony of those fragments. Mainlander was born in 1841; in 1876 he published his book Philosophy of the Redemption. That same year he killed himself.

Extracts from Scientific American (most Feb 1975) by Martin Gardner

Many thanks!