'The Rest Baffle'

Some of us are blessed or cursed with a ready stock of useless information. It came in handy in the nineteen-eighties when the board game Trivial Pursuit was the rage. Once during a Caribbean cruise, my younger sons and I creamed the competition in a shipboard trivia contest ("What is the capital of Rumania?"). Such are life’s hollow victories.

In a column headlined “Ignorant College Men,” published November 1, 1910 in the Baltimore Evening Sun, H.L. Mencken asks, “How much is education worth? To what extent does it fit a man to grapple with his environment? How much that is really worth knowing does a three-year college course add to the average man’s stock of knowledge?” 

Mencken assembles a list of seventy-four general knowledge questions – in effect, the trivia of 1910. Some read like reports from a long-lost world, and can be ignored. For instance, “Is Hawaii a territory or a colony?” and “What is the tax rate in Baltimore for 1910?” Others remain pertinent:

 

“What is pragmatism?” (William James had died just two months earlier.) “What is a writ of mandamus?” “The Nicene Creed?” “What is glucose?” “By what process does vaccination produce immunity to smallpox?”          

 

Like many of our best writers, Mencken never attended university. Neither did Herman Melville, who has Ishmael boast that “a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” Mencken’s higher academia was a newspaper city room. He was never the most modest of men but his intent with the list of questions is not to show off his own command of trivia. He admits: “Altogether I have found myself able to answer 18 with reasonable lucidity. The rest baffle.” It takes brains and a dash of humility to ask questions you are unable to answer.

 

Some of us enjoy the company of people with well-stocked brains. The risk, of course, is tedium, but assuming they don’t batter you with cascades of useless information, issued solely to makes themselves sound intelligent, they tend to be more interesting than their empty-headed cousins.

 

In an entry titled “The Burden” in Trivia (1917), Logan Pearsall Smith writes:

 

“I know too much; I have stuffed too many of the facts of History and Science into my intellectuals. My eyes have grown dim over books; believing in geological periods, cave-dwellers, Chinese Dynasties, and the fixed stars has prematurely aged me."