butters
High on a Hill
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Lillie Fortenbaugh
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bronzeage
I am a river to my people
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Which point, that Mozart out ranks Bach, or that neither has use for their fame at this point in time?
The families can make good use of it, if all the copyrights and licenses are still in effect.
Byron In Exile
Frederick Fucking Chopin
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So an idiot is the equal of a genius?
Thanks for explaining how Picasso's paintings could have sold for millions.
Byron In Exile
Frederick Fucking Chopin
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But you're the equal of them both, right?
Oh, wait, you're better because you're alive! I forgot.
So, when you're dead, are you their equal then?
Byron In Exile
Frederick Fucking Chopin
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On Suicide
H.L. Mencken
From The Human Mind, Prejudices: Sixth Series, 1927
First printed in The Baltimore Evening Sun, Aug. 9, 1926
The suicide rate, so I am told by an intelligent mortician, is going up. It is good news to his profession, which has been badly used of late by the progress of medical science, and scarcely less so by the rise of cut-throat, go-getting competition within its own ranks. It is also good news to those romantic optimists who like to believe that the human race is capable of rational acts. What could be more logical than suicide? What could be more preposterous than keeping alive? Yet nearly all of us cling to life with desperate devotion, even when the length of it remaining is palpably slight, and filled with agony. Half the time of all medical men is wasted keeping life in human wrecks who have no more intelligible reason for hanging on than a cow has for giving milk.
In part, no doubt, this absurd frenzy has its springs in the human imagination, or, as it is more poetically called, the human reason. Man, having acquired the high faculty of visualizing death, visualizes it as something painful and dreadful. It is, of course, seldom anything of the sort. The proceedings anterior to it are sometimes (though surely not always) painful, but death itself appears to be devoid of sensation, either psychic or physical. The candidate, facing it at last, simply loses his faculties. It is no more to him than it is to a coccus. The dreadful, like the painful, is not in it. It is far more likely to show elements of the grotesque. I speak here, of course, of natural death. Suicide is plainly more unpleasant, if only because there is some uncertainty about it. The candidate hesitates to shoot himself because he fears, with some show of reason, that he may fail to kill himself, and only hurt himself. Moreover, this shooting, along with most of the other more common aids to an artificial exitus, involves a kind of affront to his dignity: it is apt to make a mess. But that objection, it seems to me, is one that is bound to disappear with the progress of science. Safe, sure, easy and sanitary methods of departing this life will be invented. Some, in truth, are already known, and perhaps the fact explains the increase in suicides, so satisfactory to my mortician friend.
I pass over the theological objections to self-destruction as too sophistical to be worth a serious answer. From the earliest days Christianity has depicted life on this earth as so sad and vain that its value is indistinguishable from that of a damn. Then why cling to it? Simply because its vanity and unpleasantness are parts of the will of a Creator whose love for His creatures takes the form of torturing them. If they revolt in this world they will be tortured a million times worse in the next. I present the argument as a typical specimen of theological reasoning, and proceed to more engaging themes. Specifically, to my original thesis: that it is difficult, if not impossible, to discover any evidential or logical reason, not instantly observed to be full of fallacy, for keeping alive. The universal wisdom of the world long ago concluded that life is mainly a curse. Turn to the proverbial philosophy of any race, and you will find it full of a sense of the futility of the mundane struggle. Anticipation is better than realization. Disappointment is the lot of man. We are born in pain and die in sorrow. The lucky man died a' Wednesday. He giveth His beloved sleep. I could run the list to pages. If you disdain folk-wisdom, secular or sacred, then turn to the works of William Shakespeare. They drip with such pessimism from end to end. If there is any general idea in them, it is the idea that human existence is a painful futility. Out, out, brief candle!
Yet we cling to it in a muddled physiological sort of way — or, perhaps more accurately, in a pathological way — and even try to fill it with gaudy hocus-pocus. All men who, in any true sense, are sentient strive mightily for distinction and power, i.e., for the respect and envy of their fellowmen, i.e., for the ill-natured admiration of an endless series of miserable and ridiculous bags of rapidly disintegrating amino acids. Why? If I knew, I'd certainly not be writing books in this infernal American climate; I'd be sitting in state in a hall of crystal and gold, and people would be paying $10 a head to gape at me through peep-holes. But though the central mystery remains, it is possible, perhaps, to investigate the superficial symptoms to some profit. I offer myself as a laboratory animal. Why have I worked so hard for years and years, deperately striving to accomplish something that remains impenetrable to me to this day? Is it because I desire money? Bosh! I can't recall ever desiring it for an instant: I have always found it easy to get all I wanted. Is it, then, notoriety that I am after? Again the answer must be no. The attention of strangers is unpleasant to me, and I avoid it as much as possible. Then is it a yearning to Do Good that moves me? Bosh and blah! If I am convinced of anything, it is that Doing Good is in bad taste.
Once I ventured the guess that men worked in response to a vague inner urge for self-expression. But that was probably a shaky theory, for some men who work the hardest have nothing to express. A hypothesis with rather more plausibility in it now suggests itself. It is that men work simply in order to escape the depressing agony of contemplating life — that their work, like their play, is a mumbo-jumbo that serves them by permitting them to escape from reality. Both work and play, ordinarily, are illusions. Neither serves any solid and permanent purpose. But life, stripped of such illusions, instantly becomes unbearable. Man cannot sit still, contemplating his destiny in this world, without going frantic. So he invents ways to take his mind off the horror. He works. He plays. He accumulates the preposterous nothing called property. He strives for the coy eye-wink called fame. He founds a family, and spreads his curse over others. All the while the thing that moves him is simply the yearning to lose himself, to forget himself, to escape the tragi-comedy that is himself. Life, fundamentally, is not worth living. So he confects artificialities to make it so. So he erects a gaudy structure to conceal the fact that it is not so.
Perhaps my talk of agonies and tragi-comedies may be a bit misleading. The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense. What is ahead for the race? Even theologians can see nothing but a gray emptiness, with a burst of irrational fireworks at the end. But there is such a thing as human progress. True. It is the progress that a felon makes from the watch-house to the jail, and from the jail to the death-house. Every generation faces the same intolerable boredom.
I speak as one who has had what must be regarded, speaking statistically, as a happy life. I work a great deal, but working is more agreeable to me than anything else I can imagine. I am conscious of no vast, overwhelming and unattainable desires. I want nothing that I can't get. But it remains my conclusion, at the gate of senility, that the whole thing is a grandiose futility, and not even amusing. The end is always a vanity, and usually a sordid one, without any noble touch of the pathetic. The means remain. In them lies the secret of what is called contentment, i.e., the capacity to postpone suicide for at least another day. They are themselves without meaning, but at all events they offer a way of escape from the paralyzing reality. The central aim of life is to simulate extinction. We have been yelling up the wrong rain-spout.
H.L. Mencken
From The Human Mind, Prejudices: Sixth Series, 1927
First printed in The Baltimore Evening Sun, Aug. 9, 1926
The suicide rate, so I am told by an intelligent mortician, is going up. It is good news to his profession, which has been badly used of late by the progress of medical science, and scarcely less so by the rise of cut-throat, go-getting competition within its own ranks. It is also good news to those romantic optimists who like to believe that the human race is capable of rational acts. What could be more logical than suicide? What could be more preposterous than keeping alive? Yet nearly all of us cling to life with desperate devotion, even when the length of it remaining is palpably slight, and filled with agony. Half the time of all medical men is wasted keeping life in human wrecks who have no more intelligible reason for hanging on than a cow has for giving milk.
In part, no doubt, this absurd frenzy has its springs in the human imagination, or, as it is more poetically called, the human reason. Man, having acquired the high faculty of visualizing death, visualizes it as something painful and dreadful. It is, of course, seldom anything of the sort. The proceedings anterior to it are sometimes (though surely not always) painful, but death itself appears to be devoid of sensation, either psychic or physical. The candidate, facing it at last, simply loses his faculties. It is no more to him than it is to a coccus. The dreadful, like the painful, is not in it. It is far more likely to show elements of the grotesque. I speak here, of course, of natural death. Suicide is plainly more unpleasant, if only because there is some uncertainty about it. The candidate hesitates to shoot himself because he fears, with some show of reason, that he may fail to kill himself, and only hurt himself. Moreover, this shooting, along with most of the other more common aids to an artificial exitus, involves a kind of affront to his dignity: it is apt to make a mess. But that objection, it seems to me, is one that is bound to disappear with the progress of science. Safe, sure, easy and sanitary methods of departing this life will be invented. Some, in truth, are already known, and perhaps the fact explains the increase in suicides, so satisfactory to my mortician friend.
I pass over the theological objections to self-destruction as too sophistical to be worth a serious answer. From the earliest days Christianity has depicted life on this earth as so sad and vain that its value is indistinguishable from that of a damn. Then why cling to it? Simply because its vanity and unpleasantness are parts of the will of a Creator whose love for His creatures takes the form of torturing them. If they revolt in this world they will be tortured a million times worse in the next. I present the argument as a typical specimen of theological reasoning, and proceed to more engaging themes. Specifically, to my original thesis: that it is difficult, if not impossible, to discover any evidential or logical reason, not instantly observed to be full of fallacy, for keeping alive. The universal wisdom of the world long ago concluded that life is mainly a curse. Turn to the proverbial philosophy of any race, and you will find it full of a sense of the futility of the mundane struggle. Anticipation is better than realization. Disappointment is the lot of man. We are born in pain and die in sorrow. The lucky man died a' Wednesday. He giveth His beloved sleep. I could run the list to pages. If you disdain folk-wisdom, secular or sacred, then turn to the works of William Shakespeare. They drip with such pessimism from end to end. If there is any general idea in them, it is the idea that human existence is a painful futility. Out, out, brief candle!
Yet we cling to it in a muddled physiological sort of way — or, perhaps more accurately, in a pathological way — and even try to fill it with gaudy hocus-pocus. All men who, in any true sense, are sentient strive mightily for distinction and power, i.e., for the respect and envy of their fellowmen, i.e., for the ill-natured admiration of an endless series of miserable and ridiculous bags of rapidly disintegrating amino acids. Why? If I knew, I'd certainly not be writing books in this infernal American climate; I'd be sitting in state in a hall of crystal and gold, and people would be paying $10 a head to gape at me through peep-holes. But though the central mystery remains, it is possible, perhaps, to investigate the superficial symptoms to some profit. I offer myself as a laboratory animal. Why have I worked so hard for years and years, deperately striving to accomplish something that remains impenetrable to me to this day? Is it because I desire money? Bosh! I can't recall ever desiring it for an instant: I have always found it easy to get all I wanted. Is it, then, notoriety that I am after? Again the answer must be no. The attention of strangers is unpleasant to me, and I avoid it as much as possible. Then is it a yearning to Do Good that moves me? Bosh and blah! If I am convinced of anything, it is that Doing Good is in bad taste.
Once I ventured the guess that men worked in response to a vague inner urge for self-expression. But that was probably a shaky theory, for some men who work the hardest have nothing to express. A hypothesis with rather more plausibility in it now suggests itself. It is that men work simply in order to escape the depressing agony of contemplating life — that their work, like their play, is a mumbo-jumbo that serves them by permitting them to escape from reality. Both work and play, ordinarily, are illusions. Neither serves any solid and permanent purpose. But life, stripped of such illusions, instantly becomes unbearable. Man cannot sit still, contemplating his destiny in this world, without going frantic. So he invents ways to take his mind off the horror. He works. He plays. He accumulates the preposterous nothing called property. He strives for the coy eye-wink called fame. He founds a family, and spreads his curse over others. All the while the thing that moves him is simply the yearning to lose himself, to forget himself, to escape the tragi-comedy that is himself. Life, fundamentally, is not worth living. So he confects artificialities to make it so. So he erects a gaudy structure to conceal the fact that it is not so.
Perhaps my talk of agonies and tragi-comedies may be a bit misleading. The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense. What is ahead for the race? Even theologians can see nothing but a gray emptiness, with a burst of irrational fireworks at the end. But there is such a thing as human progress. True. It is the progress that a felon makes from the watch-house to the jail, and from the jail to the death-house. Every generation faces the same intolerable boredom.
I speak as one who has had what must be regarded, speaking statistically, as a happy life. I work a great deal, but working is more agreeable to me than anything else I can imagine. I am conscious of no vast, overwhelming and unattainable desires. I want nothing that I can't get. But it remains my conclusion, at the gate of senility, that the whole thing is a grandiose futility, and not even amusing. The end is always a vanity, and usually a sordid one, without any noble touch of the pathetic. The means remain. In them lies the secret of what is called contentment, i.e., the capacity to postpone suicide for at least another day. They are themselves without meaning, but at all events they offer a way of escape from the paralyzing reality. The central aim of life is to simulate extinction. We have been yelling up the wrong rain-spout.
bronzeage
I am a river to my people
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You are the one who assigns relative value to people. If you want to worship Mencken and Bach, I don't think anyone will object, certainly not me.
If I were better or worse than either of them, or even you, it would not make any difference in my life. Tomorrow, I will wake up with the same aches and pains. The people who like me today, will still like me tomorrow. The people who don't like me today, will find no reason to change their opinions.
If it makes you feel better, I think Mencken was a very talented writer.
Why is this so important to you?
butters
High on a Hill
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the equation is meaningless - a genius will believe their life more important than an idiot's; they will feel they have more to 'offer' the world. Perhaps they're right. But the value of a person's life is as dear to an idiot as to a genius - in fact, maybe moreso, since geniuses often succumb to depressive states of mind and end up committing suicide because of having to live their lives surrounded by idiots. Human society, imo, needs all sorts of people, at all levels of intellect, in order to function best. It is the 'job' of those endowed with advanced i.q's to help better the lot of his fellow man and not, as is frequently the case of the elevated-but-non-genius iq, to sit in judgement of others - in other words, whinge and sneer and sit on their own butts doing nothing to improve the status quo.
Personally, I'm not keen on Picasso. Many hold his work in high esteem. I don't like looking at it and wouldn't hang it in my house, whatever its value to others.
HungryJoe
Literotica Guru
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The clarity of his prose and thought give me goosebumps.
butters
High on a Hill
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I think he had issues... the M guy. His comment 'I was myself spared the intellectual humiliations of a college education' screams 'hangup to me, and maybe accounts for his need to feel superior, hence the sneering tone he adopted when speaking of Lillie and his cringe-inducing style of writng that same diary entry.
Was he short, too?
Was he short, too?
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where
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the former. A cellist friend thinks Bach is far superior. I like both equally.
Byron In Exile
Frederick Fucking Chopin
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It isn't, to me personally. I have the same aches and pains as everyone else. And I don't "worship" anyone.
But my aches and pains are not going to create a 9th Symphony.
To say that you're therefore the same as Beethoven is simply absurd.
Byron In Exile
Frederick Fucking Chopin
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Why not just say, "nothing means anything"?
Three words, and look at all the shit you had to type just to say that.
bronzeage
I am a river to my people
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Perhaps if Mozart had lived longer, he might be the equal of Bach, but how is this kind of thing measured?
It would be easier if the debate was over which was taller.
Byron In Exile
Frederick Fucking Chopin
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At the risk of offending the "people are all the same" crowd, he was pretty damned exceptional.
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bloody men and your obsession with measurements!
you can't measure some things. some things are wholly subjective and Bach's superiority or otherwise to Mozart is one of those things
Byron In Exile
Frederick Fucking Chopin
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I'm sure that in some alternate universe you would have given them both a run for their money.
bronzeage
I am a river to my people
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I don't recall ever saying that.
What is it about the Mencken journal entry that you posted appeals to you?
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you are spectacularly cranky today. are you a woman pretending to be a man on here and you have PMT or something?
butters
High on a Hill
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I didn't say 'nothing means anything' because I don't believe that.
What you leave behind you in death holds the meaning of your life. Whether it be works of art (whatever the medium) or the love you've shown family and friends, or the kindnesses you've done for complete strangers, the joys you've created for others... these are your epitaph.
As for typing shit - oh well, comes to us all. When I'm very old and senile, maybe I won't be able to communicate at all.
I don't understand your problem with people on here not sharing your opinion with the man's diary entry. Was it intended as some pseudo-intellectual test for posters? Those who commended his self-important attitude would pass while those who didn't failed? Oh well. I'll sleep easy in my bed. Just because we (other posters here) might not like the guy's attitude towards his ex-neighbour doesn't mean to say we can't find pleasure in his other, public works.
bronzeage
I am a river to my people
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That pretty much sums up the debate.
Next we can go after Jackson and Presley. Michael was the King of Pop, and Elvis was simply The King.
Presley has a stamp in his honor, and was certainly taller.
bronzeage
I am a river to my people
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Your confidence in me is inspiring.
HungryJoe
Literotica Guru
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I couldn't agree more, but when you talk about Mencken, you might as well be talking about Nietzsche or Noam Chomsky. It's a guaranteed pissing contest. Forgive me for staying well-clear, but I'm greatly enjoying your posts with his writing.
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Byron In Exile
Frederick Fucking Chopin
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No more than I have in Charles Manson.
The human mind is capable of inventing any number of alternate realities.
butters
High on a Hill
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The way I see it, is that if M had written that as a piece of characterisation, then it would have been a fine piece of writing. It was clean, concise, and led most of us to feel some dislike for the character's own nature. Job done. It is unfortunate, then, that he was speaking of himself. Of course, there's another possibility: he was perfectly aware that his words would see exposure and wanted to be disliked. Looking at things from all angles. Perhaps he disliked himself.
it happens
it happens
