Mencken on notebooks and remarks

 In yesterday's note, H.L. Mencken was talking about remarks or aphorisms. He offered an apology for making a collection of them.

Much better men have done the same to public edification and applause, for example, Blaise Pascal, Francois de la Rochefoucauld and F.W. Nietzsche, and also some who were perhaps definitely worse, for example, Bronson Alcott and Henry Ward Beecher. 

Mencken pointed out that the form is not common in the “incomparable republic.” That’s a point that puzzles me, and I wonder whether it’s true. The people I grew up with told stories, rather than wrote them. When they drew lessons from experience, they tended to hone the expression until it was sharp, clear and brief. Scholars would call those sayings aphorisms. It could be that others, especially the Europeans, have done a better job of collecting, rather than making, remarks. 

And of course Mencken says what most of us are too polite to say. Among the thinkers who write remarks, some are better than others.

• Source: H.L. Mencken, Minority Report: H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956,