The remark as a literary form

 Here is H.L. Mencken describing what he’s up to in Minority Report:

This is not a book, but a notebook. It is made up of selections chosen more or less at random from the memoranda of long years devoted to the pursuit, the anatomizing and embalming of ideas.

He’s been thinking, which is what writers do. And so Mencken is doing what writers do, throwing … notes into a bin, planning to reflect on them later.

He complained that one life is a bad scheme. We need two: one in which to observe and study and a second to set down conclusions.

Forced, as he is by the present irrational arrangement to undertake the second function before he has made substantial progress with the first, he limps along like an athlete only half trained.

The book is in the form of remarks or aphorisms. Mencken noticed things he found remarkable and made notes. 

We all notice things as we go about the business of living. But each of us notices different things. A certain kind of reader — I’m an example — likes to read books of remarks or aphorisms just to see what the other guy saw that I might have missed.

It’s odd to me that schools teach students how to write sentences, paragraphs and essays, but don’t have much to say about the remark as a literary form. Some writers — Wittgenstein, for example — wrote remarks, rather than essays or book-length narratives or arguments. An illuminating remark is its own reward. Why do we have to assume that it must fit into a system?

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