Quote from–H.L. Mencken on Reclaiming Democracy from the Mob Mentality That Masquerades for It

“He writes:

‘The weakness of those of us who take a gaudy satisfaction in our ideas, and battle for them violently, and face punishment for them willingly and even proudly, is that we forget the primary business of the man in politics, which is the snatching and safeguarding of his job. That business, it must be plain, concerns itself only occasionally with the defense and propagation of ideas, and even then it must confine itself to those that, to a reflective man, must usually appear to be insane. The first and last aim of the politician is to get votes, and the safest of all ways to get votes is to appear to the plain man to be a plain man like himself, which is to say, to appear to him to be happily free from any heretical treason to the body of accepted platitudes — to be filled to the brim with the flabby, banal, childish notions that challenge no prejudice and lay no burden of examination upon the mind.

[…]

It seems to me that this fear of ideas is a peculiarly democratic phenomenon, and that it is nowhere so horribly apparent as in the United States, perhaps the nearest approach to an actual democracy yet seen in the world. It was Americans who invented the curious doctrine that there is a body of doctrine in every department of thought that every good citizen is in duty bound to accept and cherish; it was Americans who invented the right-thinker. The fundamental concept, of course, was not original. The theologians embraced it centuries ago, and continue to embrace it to this day. It appeared on the political side in the Middle Ages, and survived in Russia into our time. But it is only in the United States that it has been extended to all departments of thought. It is only here that any novel idea, in any field of human relations, carries with it a burden of obnoxiousness, and is instantly challenged as mysteriously immoral by the great masses of right-thinking men. It is only here, so far as I have been able to make out, that there is a right way and a wrong way to think about the beverages one drinks with one’s meals, and the way children ought to be taught in the schools, and the manner in which foreign alliances should be negotiated, and what ought to be done about the Bolsheviki.'”
–H.L. Mencken

Please view the entire article here: H.L. Mencken on Reclaiming Democracy from the Mob Mentality That Masquerades for It
by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

Notations from The Gentle Art of Tramping by Stephen Graham

What I thought, when I’d only reached page four of the text, might leave me for a shitty distasteful feeling that I would wish to scrub from my mind and body as one would a rape–should I continue to read. I took a great amount of time, even in my sleep, considering the context of this book, that had a copy date of 1926. I decided to be amazed to wonder over how the writer thought and how much I will never know if he wrote with the view and influence of humans present in his social grouping at the time. I wonder, even, if he might have been considered a rogue, bluntly writing as he willed his hand to do.

“…They learn little on their wanderings beyond how to cadge, how to steal, how to avoid dogs and the police. They are not pilgrims but outlaws, and many would be highway robbers had they the vitality and the pluck necessary to hold up wayfarers. Most of them are but poor walkers, so that the word tramp is often misapplied to them….”

Later, on page 29, he writes, “…Class is the most disgusting institution of civilization, because it puts barriers between man and man….”

The remaining notes, from my best recollection, are simply things that struck me.

“So when we look on a river we are affected by its hidden relationship to our own life. The river interprets our mood. The road suggests God as a taskmaster who would have us work; the river suggests Him as a poet who would have us live in poetry. The Creator must be a poet–not a General or a Judge or a Master Builder; there is so much of pure poetry in His creation….”

“What is a tramping day if it does not liberate a voice, so that you can sing out your soul to the free sky.”

“The heart can be lifted up by poetry even more than by song. And the inner meaning and the sense of a poem becomes one’s own on the march when it lends it rhythms and verbal emotions to express the hidden yearnings of one’s own being.”

“The life opens us with its very breadth. Is your friend too thin; do not diet him under a white ceiling, but give him air. Air will fill him. It is not the air alone that cures and fills, but what you breathe in with the air. You breathe in the spirit of the open. You breathe in the wideness of the sky; you reach out to the free horizon. It makes a man big, it builds a man within.”

“In the long halt, therefore, one has not stopped living, because one has ceased going onward. You get poised on your center. You feel the origins of joy and pain–deep down at the heart’s core, the place from which something in you is welling up all the while, welling up and overflowing, flowing away in waves and tides, to break on a mystical shore.”

“Self-expression is life. What gives more satisfaction to one’s being than to have expressed oneself.”

“Each day Nature puts her magic mirror in our hands. ‘Oh child, do you see yourself today?'”

Morning Trip (76)

“Generosity is that palpable extra that comes along with the gift, motiveless as a good wind. Best is the extra that comes unencumbered: pure generosity of spirit, always replenishing itself. We the less generous are quick to suspect it, remembering what we’ve given and why. But those who have it irradiate the day. They redefine the meaning of wealth. We fall in love with them, we try to shine that brightly, yet before long they’ve mostly instructed us about what it is we want to keep. Blessed are the generous who keep enough for themselves so we can live with them without guilt. Blessed, too, are those who receive well, so the generous get their reward.”
– Stephen Dunn

Morning Trip (75)

“There it is; the light across the water. Your story. Mine. His. It has to be seen to be believed. And it has to be heard. In the endless babble of narrative, in spite of the daily noise, the story waits to be heard.
Some people say that the best stories have no words. It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case always the wrong size to fit in the template called language.”
– Jeanette Winterson

Morning Trip (74)

“It is only an error in judgment to make a mistake, but it shows infirmity of character to adhere to it when discovered”
–Christian Nevell Bovee

Morning Trip (73)

“even before trees rocks I was nothing
when I’m dead nowhere I’ll be nothing

this ink painting of wind blowing through pines
who hears it?

sin like a madman until you can’t do anything else
no room for any more

fuck flattery success money
all I do is lie back and suck my thumb

one long pure beautiful road of pain
and the beauty of death and no pain

mirror facing mirror
nowhere else

passion’s red thread is infinite
like the earth always under me

a woman is enlightenment when you’re with her and the red thread
of both your passions flare inside you and you see

your name Mori means forest like the infinite fresh
green distances of your blindness

my monk friend has a wierd[sic] endearing habit
he weaves sandals and leaves them secretly by the roadside

no words sitting alone night in my hut eyes closed hands open
wisps of an unknown face

we’re lost where the mind can’t find us
utterly lost”
–Ikkyu

Morning Trip (72)

“The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light take the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady, I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.”
–Theodore Roethke

Morning Trip (71)

When the Sky Clears
“The drop grows happy by losing itself in the river.
A pain when beyond human range becomes something else.

One man’s heart died when he insisted on treating his own problems.
Sometimes people solve jute knots by rubbing them on rocks.

Since I am weak, I sigh instead of weeping.
My experience tells me that water can change and become air.

The sky abruptly clears following thick clouds and heavy rain.
The clouds, recognizing separation, cried and vanished into non-existence.

We make the back of the mirror green in order to see our faces.
Sometimes nature makes the front of the mirror green as well.

We love seeing the beauty of poppies and lilies.
When the eyes lose themselves in the colors, they are seeing at last.”
– Ghalib
translated by Robert Bly