In another parsing of Mad Men, the New Yorker's Book Bench marveled over the progression of reading tastes from 1960 and 1962 and Don Draper's jaw line (twice). In season one, Ayn Rand's books were passed around, which if you read this article you'll know will only attract the wrong element today. But! There was also that big todo over Lady Chatterly's Lovah in season one. Look! I found it.
Anyway, come 1962 Don finds himself alone in a bar, and some young beatnik of a creature is reading Meditations in an Emergency . He tells Don, it's not something you would like or read or something simarly undermining. But because Don is an insolent narcissist — and we've seen he's a had at least one tryst with an arty "downtown" woman — we find him reading it by the end of the episode. Taking to a line that sounds more like a someecard in the Cry For Help section than literature:
Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.
Only to mysteriously mail it at the end to some unknown recipient (Could it be Rachael Menken? Could be!)
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