Tuesday, June 10, 2014

A Little Twilight Music in Baltimore


A Baltimore street scene on June 19, 1948

Incapacitated by a cerebral hemorrhage in the late 1940s, H. L. Mencken found himself denied the two vocations and avocations that had chiefly sustained him through the previous 68 years — reading and writing.
That was a hellish cosmic irony for an author and critic, but Mencken finally countered it with stoic, quotidian compensations — hearing the gossipy crime items from that day’s Baltimore Sun, breakfasting on fruit juice and soft boiled eggs with bread while watching neighborhood children walk and run to school, listening to “the clear, yellow sunshine” of Schubert.
“What remained to him of his old days was music; many mornings he told me how he had listened for a couple of hours before and how superb it had been,” recalled Robert Allen Durr. “Yet in truth he had left in him something the average man never acquires — the capacity to enjoy the commonplace activities of life. Though these, of course, could not make up for his inability to work, they helped. One lovely autumn morning, Mr. Mencken sat over in the sun so that it fell on his back. ‘Well, this is very nice. This is fine. This ought to make us feel good. … You know, I always enjoyed life in all its forms. I’ve always taken a great pleasure in getting up in the morning, having breakfast and settling down to work. I had a good time while it lasted.’”
Wisely, Mencken foresaw the final importance of unimportant things.
Source: “The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken” by Terry Teachout

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