Posted on 01/28/2006 7:32:20 AM PST by Borges
After drinking two mild Gibson cocktails and enjoying a crackling fire and the lively conversation, Mencken again complained of not feeling well, and before going upstairs to his third-floor back bedroom, again spoke to Cheslock.
"Louis, this is the last time you'll see me," he said to his old friend, Rodgers wrote.
At 9:15 p.m., Cheslock left the Hollins Street residence and drove home through a gathering sleet storm.
Mencken climbed into bed, turned on the radio, and fell asleep listening to a Mozart concert.
Early Sunday morning, when Rancho Brown, a Johns Hopkins Hospital orderly, arrived to help get Mencken bathed and dressed, he was unable to awaken him.
His physician reckoned that Mencken had died in the wee hours of Jan. 29, 1956.
(Excerpt) Read more at baltimoresun.com ...
Are there any books of his legendary quotes which include the dates he made those quotes?
I never could understand the fascination with that guy. I was forced to read some of his stuff years ago. He was pretty much an a-hole from what I could tell.
"To be an American is, unquestionably, to be the noblest, the grandest, the proudest mammal that ever hoofed the verdure of God's green footstool. Often, in the black abysm of the night, the thought that I am one awakens me with a blast of trumpets, and I am thrown into a cold sweat by contemplation of the fact. I shall cherish it on the scaffold; it will comfort me in hell."
HLM from "The Man Within"
HLM
You have to speak and READ English as a first language, or else you pretty much won't have a clue.
How charming.
[388] Despite all the current gabble about curved space and other such phantasms, it is much easier to think of the universe as infinite than to think of it as having metes and bounds. If we try to think of it as finite we must somehow conjure up a region of sheer nothingness beyond its limits, and that is a feat I defy anyone to undertake. The human mind, in fact, simply cannot grasp the concept of nothingness. All we know of the universe tends to prove that it is unlimited, and the more we learn about it the more that impression is confirmed. Am I here, perhaps citing a subjective reason to support an objective fact? Well, why not? What other reasons are there? We can examine the universe only through our senses, and our senses tell us that it spreads infinitely in all directions. By senses, of course, I do not mean the unaided senses of a child; I mean the enormously reinforced senses of a man of science. His telescope magnifies the evidence of his eyes, but what it tells him must still be recorded by his two optic nerves.
As for me, I refuse to waste thought upon a structure that apparently has no limits in either time or space. The human mind can imagine it, but that is as far as anyone can go. Our ordinary thinking constantly assumes temporal and spatial boundaries; indeed, we always think of objects and phenomena in terms of duration and extension. But there is no sign of either in the universe. We must either accept it as infinite, or stop thinking about it altogether. Any effort to put bounds to it, as for instance that of Einstein and his followers, leads quickly to plain absurdity. Curved space explains nothing whatsoever: it simply begs the question. Nor is there any genuine illumination in the general doctrine of relativity. It only says what every man of any sense knew before--that time and space are not absolute values, but only relative.
This from someone who stops by a post memorializing HLM to question what the big deal is all about. If you have to ask...
What Huck said....(in #6)
That's an excellent little passage there. Seems to be a good deal of stoicism in his thinking.
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
On the Roosevelts:
Where is your equal opportunity now? Here in this Eden of clowns, with the highest rewards of clowning theoretically open to every poor boy - here in the very citadel of democracy we found and cherish a clown dynasty!
That's why they sent you there [school], because you didn't know jack. and you needed to be assigned some stuff to read. Apparently, though, another piteous failure of our schools.
(You give me pleasure, Eyes. It is rare that a single post so definitively marks someone out as a complete boob that one hasn't least hesitation to offend him.)
Who pissed in your cornflakes this morning?
If anyone has a copy of his Christmas party story where he invited a bunch of homeless winos for a big bash, I'd love to re-read it. It was hilarious, and a real slap at the snobs.
To be happy one must be
a) well fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion,
b) full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of one's fellow men,
and c) delicately and unceasingly amused according to one's taste.
It is my contention that, if this definition be accepted, there is no country in the world wherein a man constituted as I am -- a man of my peculiar weaknesses, vanities, appetites, and aversions -- can be so happy as he can be in the United States. Going further, I lay down the doctrine that it is a sheer physical impossibility for such a man to live in the United States and not be happy.
More touching than "The Gift of the Magi," for sure: http://www.io.com/gibbonsb/mencken/bumsxmas.html
I may disagree with his opinion on clergy as a whole but it rather describes every politician of the last 150 years.
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