Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity. One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now mythical ether. Nearly the whole of Europe could be lost in that stupendous region of worn-out farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums: one could thrown in France, Germany and Italy, and still have room for the British Isles. And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the “progress” it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac; there are probably single square miles in America. If the whole of the late Confederacy were to be engulfed by a tidal wave tomorrow, the effect upon the civilized minority of men in the world would be but little greater than that of a flood of the Yang-tse-kiang. It would be impossible in all history to match so complete a drying-up of a civilization.
If one can get past H.L. Mencken’s harshness (his writing, I note, expanded my adolescent vocabulary to include cad, bounder, bosh, buncome, poltroon, charlatan, and mountebank), one can discover a number of admirable qualities in his prose. Among them I quite like the faux statistic, the technique of comparing two things, or else asserting a near-universality, with unresearched numerical specificity. The device appears in the passage above here: There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac. An acre, eh? Not a hectare, a square click or square mile? Mencken talks as if he had consulted his Atlas of Accomplished Gentlemen to arrive at his astonishing conclusion, but of course he consulted nothing other than his Muse.
The faux statistic instructs the mind to comprehend a particular magnitude; in expending the energy to imagine the size of an acre (how large is my backyard?), the imagination spends more time with the image and therefore finds it more vivid and compelling, even though the ratiocinating faculties demand more (some!) evidence. This trick might cause your college professor to spill half an ounce of red ink in protest, but if your concern is not cautious argument but a more spiritual Truth, there’s nothing more effective than a few made-up facts.
