unprompted/Notes/mencken-chrestomathy.md

Rough Notes

• I dunno. Truth can feel pretty empty, so fantasy, stories, have a pretty solid appeal by comparison.
• The common cry of Atheism - "They're all idiots!"
• I'm content to let the machines do the thinking - they're better at it, and I'd rather be off drinking in a cafe somewhere.

Quotes

• "The imagination... gave [man] his first lift above his fellow primates. It enabled him to visualize a condition of existence better than that he was experiencing... even today he keeps on going in the same manner.""
  • "His corpus of high faiths and confidences--in brief, his burden of errors."
• "Faith may be defined as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable."
• "The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in Hell."

Questions

Definitions

• Chrestomathy (n.) - edited collection of writings
• Salubrious (adj.) - good fer yer health
• Swedenborgianism (n.) - New Christianity. Emanuel Swedenborg.
  • God is kind, never angry
  • The stories are just that, not to be taken literally
• poltroonery (n.) - an utter coward
• Brummagem (adj.) - a cheap counterfeit
• Roister (v.) - celebrate in a noisy, boisterous way
• Popinjay (n.) - vain or conceited person. Dressed extravagantly.
• Mountebank (n.) - a charlatan; tricking others out of money