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| 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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