Let's get rid of it then, by all means

American humorist Don Marquis, creator of Archie & Mehitabel, was born on this day in 1878. He wrote:


"The only obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race."

Men were bad, incorrigibly so, Sully knew. The specimens lurking in the library lobby, adoze in chairs and at tables, groping in the stacks and jerking off in the stalls, surfing the Internet for God knew what, plotting their hijacks and heists, were wholly representative of the populace at large. Mischief on their minds, malice in their hearts. Malevolence. Here the accumulated wisdom of the world, the exalted ideas of great men and women, published for posterity and arrayed on row after row of shelves, could not avail against its palpable presence.  -- Chapter 16, The Misforgotten.

You do, however, need this book

On this day in 1947, the first commercial around-the-world flight began.

On this day in 1972, the Watergate scandal was uncovered.

"The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded." -- Gustave Flaubert.

What did he remember, say, of Moby Dick or Madame Bovary? “The heartless voids and immensities of the universe.” That was Melville, wasn’t it? Or was it Flaubert? The universe was as inhospitable to Emma as it was to Ishmael, equally cruel, capricious and senseless on land or at sea. That was what he’d carried away from books. The inscrutable pointlessness of life. The hostility it had in store for us. A hero or heroine, brimming with hope and good will, sets out in a novel to engage with life, prepared for a skirmish, for its inevitable bumps and bruises, and ends up crushed, demolished.
Life took you where it would, but who needed books to learn that? -- The Misforgotten, Chapter 22.