4.8.25 - An Essay by H.L. Mencken
Recently I had a very strange experience on the upper east side.
I was walking on an overcast day, and there was gigantic pile of books on the sidewalk, somewhere near the high 80s and Madison avenue. This pile was truly enormous, to put it simply, think of it like an oval with a major diamater of maybe eight to ten feet and a minor diamater of around six? At its deepest it was maybe three or four feet tall. And it was all books. It was more books than I have ever seen in a pile ever. And the books weren't like junk, they were all old, interesting, curated books. Not mass market paperbacks. I'd open one and it would have be something published from 1925. One of the ones I picked up said from the library of Ralph Pulitzer, and then another sticker/stamp assigning it to the library of the person who I guess most recently owned it. There were old art books (one I grabbed was the World of the Market by Mark Tobey), collections of poems, old editions of famous classics, a really old hardback of "The Way Things Work," periodicals, big cases of carefully labelled and sorted VHS tapes . . .
Around this pile was maybe eigh to ten people scavenging for books and frantically putting them into boxes or tote bags. I asked someone what the hell was going on. Apparently someone in the apartment building next to the pile died, and I guess he had no heirs or family to inherit this big collection he had amassed, so the apartment building just had to dump it. It was going to rain in about twenty minutes and people were just trying to grab what they coud.
This was a genuinly upsetting encounter that made me think about my life a lot. I collect a lot of stuff, I try and preserve a lot of stuff, I have a ton of old books and magazines and comic books, is this what eventually happens to all of it? I guess nothing matters if you don't have a family that cares. You just die and all that shit is garbage. This whole little world you curated is garbage. I was going to write a blog post about that but as a law student with no audience I made no time to do that. But that's my thoughts on the matter anyway. The main takeaway is, no one gives a fuck about you I guess. And no one really cares about amateur record keeping and curation. If you're a professor at university or something the books in your office may get donated or added to the school collections once you pass. But if you're just some weird due on the upper east side your library is going to get tossed.
Anyways, one of the books I grabbed was Prejudices: Thir Series by H.L. Mencken. Laying in bad with a bit of a sniffle today (which I blame on my reduced meat consumption, which I may write about another day). I had no idea what it was about, and just dived into it blind. I really liked the first of his essays: On Being An American. I have nothing to say about it except that its worth a read, because I think it really shows that a lot of the stuff about our national culture that feels so weird and broken right now is not new at all. I chuckled a bit at his characterization of Americans, because much of it rings just as true today. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/53474
cheers,
knxnts