A Quite Curious and Illuminating Biography of Mark Twain

                                                               An Earth Manifesto publication by Dr. Tiffany B. Twain  

                                                                                                                             April 21, 2011

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in rural Missouri on November 30, 1835, and he died on April 21, 1910 in southwestern Connecticut, exactly 101 years ago from the date this biography is completed.  When he was born, Halley’s Comet was visible in the skies, and then the comet returned the year he died.  Halley’s Comet has a highly elliptical orbit that brings it inside the Earth’s orbit from the outer reaches of our solar system once every 75 years.  It is quite remarkable that two of the near approaches of this famous comet to the Sun coincided with the birth and death of Sam Clemens. 

In the year 1909, by then internationally known as Mark Twain, he wrote:  "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835.  It is coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it.  It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet.  The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'"  And sure enough, he died the day after the comet’s closest approach to the Sun in 1910.

A biography can shed light on a subject’s formative influences, motivations, character, and even deep psychological impulses.  Sam Clemens was an extraordinarily prolific letter writer, and many of his letters were saved over the years, so one of the most extensive collections of letters ever written by one author still exists.  These letters, together with his writings and the record of his public lectures and travels and social activism and personal associations, shed a fascinating light on the persona of this man, who late in life bragged that as Mark Twain he had became “the most conspicuous person on the planet.”  He once wryly noted that he was “born modest, but it didn’t last.”  In 1897, he wrote: "I am not an American.  I am the American.  I am the human race compacted and crammed into a single suit of clothes, but quite able to represent all its massed moods and inspiration.  I am only human, though I regret it."  Ha!

The Purpose of this Biography

The purpose of these words is to explore the fascinating cultural phenomenon of one of America’s greatest personages, and to apply the humor and exuberant cheerfulness and wise insights and irreverently trenchant observations of this marvelous historical character to our modern day challenges and conundrums. 

Mark Twain is highly relevant to people in the world today for five primary reasons.  First, he cultivated open-minded and even revolutionary attitudes toward vital concerns such as slavery, discrimination, women’s rights, human follies, and political corruption.  His thoughts on these topics can help give us with a deeper context to discover the greater truths that lie beneath much conflict and social antagonism and reactionary movements in the world today.

Second, Mark Twain had a facile and mischievous faculty of being able to mock absurdities like political extremism and dogmatic religious fundamentalism.  His light-hearted approach to patently preposterously beliefs is something we need to rediscover today in order to debunk the growing insanity of the Religious Right in their unholy alliance with extreme conservatism and obstructionist opposition to ecumenical understandings and forward-thinking social progress, and even to peaceful coexistence, environmental protections and sustainable existence.  Mark Twain’s humorous perspectives have been as powerful and influential and as serious as the great Voltaire’s earlier salvos against the crushing infamy of socially nefarious and wrongheaded establishment doctrines.

Third, Mark Twain coined the phrase “Gilded Age” and set forth ideas about the negative impacts of irresponsible corporations and wealthy “robber barons” and profound inequalities in human societies, so his early thoughts about these topics provide a jumping off point for honest investigations into our own increasingly inegalitarian modern age with its ratcheting up of disparities in the concentration of wealth between the haves and the have nots and its socially risky and instability-provoking increases in inequities between people.

Fourth, Mark Twain’s anger at the brutal U.S. conquest of the Philippines during the Spanish-American War gives us a valuable perspective on imperialism and aggression in war.  In our new age of terrorism and militaristic counterterrorism and armed occupations of other nations, and in a world dominated by a superpower whose econo-political system is effectively dictated by rich people and profit-prepossessed multinational corporations, the need has grown greater than ever for a new Progressive movement lubricated by sensible ideas and intelligent attitudes. 

Fifth, as historian Will Durant once wrote, “a sense of humor is born of perspective, so it bears a near kinship to philosophy;  each is the soul of the other.”  A modern Twainian perspective offers us hope of altering the dysfunctional status quo and helping make the world a healthier and safer place.  The Earth Manifesto is a philosophical “save the world” undertaking, and it is my hope that the hook of better understanding Mark Twain’s life and worldviews from a more modern and feminine perspective will be effective in advancing this effort.

An Overview of the Life of Sam Clemens

Since Sam Clemens was born in 1835 and died in 1910, he witnessed far-reaching changes during his life.  Three men whose ideas had some of the most profound impacts in human history on the way we understand the world lived contemporaneously with Mark Twain:  Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein.  Sam Clemens lived in a Missouri culture that accepted slavery and then was involved in fighting a terrible Civil War over the issue in which 600,000 Americans died.  In the span of his lifetime, he saw the emancipation of slaves by Abraham Lincoln and the reconstruction of the South, as well as numerous violent conflicts with native Indians.  He lived through financial panics of 1857, 1873, 1884, 1893 and 1907, and a Gilded Age of “robber barons” and extreme inequalities.  He spent years in the Wild West, which was experiencing rapid growth after the epic California gold rush and the Comstock silver strike.  Communications improved during his years from correspondence by Pony Express to the electric telegraph to the telephone, and transportation improved from horses and covered wagons to railroads and then automobiles.  Steam power was largely replaced by electric power.  The world’s population increased more than 50% from 1.1 billion to 1.7 billion while he was alive, and the United States expanded from 25 states to 46 states. 

As these events were unfolding, Sam spent most of his boyhood in Hannibal on the west bank of the mighty Mississippi.  Hannibal at the time was a very small town about a day’s steamboat journey up the river from St. Louis.  Sammy was a mischievous boy, full of fun and games and mischief.  He had an idyllic but adventurous boyhood, as one may surmise from the novels he later wrote about Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Becky Thatcher.  Sam regarded youth as a lovely thing, especially in retrospect, “and certainly never was there a diviner time to me in this world,” he later noted of his childhood.  Bravo!

The Early Life of Samuel Clemens

Sam was born into a poor family, and he got only a rudimentary education.  But he was an avid reader, and became a lover of books and a lifelong advocate of public libraries.  As a teenager, he worked at a variety of jobs in Hannibal.  His most important early occupation was as an apprentice typesetter in the burgeoning newspaper printing business, where he eventually began to write stories for newspapers.  He dreamed of becoming a respected riverboat pilot, so he wrangled his way into a position as a pilot’s apprentice for two years to learn the intimate features of the treacherous and ever-changing river between St. Louis and New Orleans.  Such knowledge was critically important to a boat’s safe passage, and the job fed his love for travel and adventure, so he regarded this period of his life as amongst the best. 

It was during this time, in May 1858, that he met the niece of a riverboat pilot friend, a 14-year-old girl named Laura Wright.  She had a sweet and alluring Victorian charm, a cheerful presence, a precocious wisdom, and a young pure innocence, so she became a source of inspiration to him for the rest of his life.  She was a magnificent muse and his “dream-sweetheart”, and a model for some of the female characters in his novels.

After two years as an apprentice under a pilot named Horace Bixby, he became a licensed pilot on paddle-wheel steamboats.  He loved this exciting work as a riverboat pilot, but unfortunately commerce up and down the Mississippi was rudely interrupted by the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861.  Soon after the start of the war, Samuel joined his brother Orion on a stagecoach journey across the Great Plains, over the Rocky Mountains, and through Salt Lake City to the rough-and-tumble Wild West towns of Nevada.  In the aftermath of the Gold Rush to California, the state of Nevada was in the throes of a mining frenzy for riches of silver and gold and other minerals.  The famous Comstock Lode near Virginia City was in the process of becoming the single most valuable source of mined silver in world history. 

The Comstock Lode was discovered in 1859.  Soon thereafter, the Virginia City area was transformed from a sparsely-populated near-wilderness area to a mining boomtown.  As one might imagine, development was chaotic when risk-taking miners from all over the world descended upon this area and indulged in a carelessly destructive mineral mining mania.  The obsessive gold-fever enthusiasm of the miners is legendary.  “They came to the Comstock to get rich!  Some did, most didn’t, and many died trying.” 

Samuel Clemens began calling himself Mark Twain while writing for the Territorial Enterprise newspaper in Virginia City in February 1863, at the age of 27.  This boomtown had many saloons and ‘houses of ill repute’, and newspapers, and even an opera house.  Its seedy “Barbary Coast” area had a wide variety of ethnic groups and plenty of gambling and prostitution and crime.

Not long after adopting this now-famous pen name, Mark Twain visited bawdy San Francisco for the first time.  It is entirely possible that he went up to the top of Twin Peaks during his stays in San Francisco between 1863 and 1867.  The view to the west of this prominence from a proper vantage point on a clear day reveals the mysteriously mystical but very real Farallon Islands.  These rocky islands lie 27 miles northwest of the Golden Gate.  The islands teem with seabirds like Tufted Puffins and Storm-petrels, and with marine mammals like harbor seals and sea lions and elephant seals.  This aquatic wilderness was the scene of an awesome display of the living world’s mysterious and beautiful and daunting natural order when wildlife enthusiasts on a whale-watching expedition in 1997 reported having witnessed an attack just south of the Farallons in which a killer whale lifted a great white shark right out of the sea.  Ouch!

Twenty-four hundred miles southwest of the Farallons lie the Hawaiian Islands, which were known in the nineteenth century as the Sandwich Islands.  Mark Twain spent more than four months there in 1866 traveling and writing captivating sketches.  He later developed a highly entertaining and creative series of lectures about the curiosities of these Sandwich Islands, real and invented.  In the years to follow, Mark Twain became famous for his humorous stories about a wide variety of things, including his Sandwich Island visit, his celebrated story about a jumping frog contest in Calaveras County, his “roughing it” adventures in the Wild West, and his 1867 “Innocents Abroad” travels to Europe.  He later recalled that The Innocents Abroad book was the turning point in his life, because it led to his remarkable success as a literary giant after he turned to writing novels like the Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Mark Twain became an American icon because of his clever humor, insightful journalism, entertaining lectures, great novels, incisive social commentary, opinionated persona and philosophical thinking.  He gave public lectures for decades to overflowing audiences, and frequently provoked uproarious laughter and received acclaim for his performances.  He spoke during the lectures with a captivating drawl and a deadpan delivery, and made dramatically effective use of pauses to heighten anticipation and amusement.  His talks featured lampooning wit, whimsical observations and practical jokes.  Part of his genius sprung from his perceptive awareness of the natural pretensions and vanities and follies and fraudulent behaviors of humankind in general, and his clever ability to humorously depict them. 

I highly recommend the filmmaker Ken Burns’ almost poetic Mark Twain;  it is a thorough production that provides excellent insights into the life and character of San Clemens.  It is available on Netflix.  Check it out!

Formative Influences, Including the Genesis and Revelations of The Innocents Abroad

Mark Twain loved to travel, and once he had left Missouri, he rarely returned to the Midwest for the rest of his life.  He lived primarily in the Northeast, and spent more than eight years living abroad during the 1890’s.  His extensive travels during his life reflected the fact that he had impulses just like you and me, though everyone has varying degrees of such motivating drives.  We all tend to love variety and dislike routine, and many people have desires for freedom, adventure, travel, escape and even an ardor for undertaking a heroic odyssey of some sort.  Travel broadens one’s horizons and perspective.  Sam would have agreed that all who wander are not necessarily lost.  Ah, wanderlust!  Make no mistake about it, however; “wherever you go, there you are.” 

Each of us also has urges, in contrast, to put down roots and find a calm and connected balance in our lives.  Most of us would consider it ideal to have a secure base in life from which we would be relatively free to make our own individualistic adventurous excursions.  Such a situation fosters variety, which is a nice existential spice, stimulating and rather satisfying.

Mark Twain’s first travels to Europe and the Middle East were on a five-month voyage in 1867 from New York City to the Mediterranean and the Holy Land aboard the elegant side-wheel steamship Quaker City.  He was accompanied on this trip by a group of 75 other passengers who were for the most part staunchly religious.  His pilgrimage to the Holy Land revealed a shocking reality of filth, beggars, appalling conditions, desolate landscape, ruins, squalidly ignorant and superstitious people, braying donkeys, melancholy dogs, petty frauds, vandalism, and historical falsifications.  

After returning from his Quaker City voyage, he assembled and revised the many columns he had written for newspapers about the journey, and published a book with the full title of The Innocent’s Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress.  He was no doubt striving to piggyback his book on the shoulders of the extraordinarily successful 1678 classic by John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is To Come.  This simplistic Christian allegory is one of the most widely published works of literature in history.  Appropriately, The Innocent’s Abroad became the best-selling of Mark Twain’s works during his lifetime.

By the time the Quaker City returned to the East Coast, Mark Twain regarded believers in a literal “Second Advent” of Jesus Christ with severe skepticism.  He had seen that believers in this biblical myth seemed to relish the idea of innocent non-believers being slaughtered in mass during foretold apocalyptic End Times even more than they actually looked forward to a time of potential fellowship and love and peace and beauty and glory and redemption and salvation.  In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for instance, Mark Twain portrays people being more devoted in their religious observances to ‘duty to God’ than to brotherhood for the poor or concerns for slaves or outcasts.  Mark Twain once remarked:  “This thing of stretching the narrow garment of belief till it fits the broad shoulders of a wish, is too much for my stomach.”

A deeper investigation into the End Times concepts of religious fundamentalists is explored in the Earth Manifesto essay Rapture Mania: Bizarre Beliefs and Epic Epiphanies.  Check it out!  Read about the bizarre ‘Rapture Index’, and the wiser idea of a Sustainability Index that would help us to collectively see ways to accomplish vital greater good goals like reducing injustices, mitigating inequalities, solving existential problems, building peace, reducing the production of toxic wastes, stopping rainforest destruction, protecting wetlands, mitigating global warming-induced climate change, protecting biological diversity, and discouraging rapid human population growth.

Mark Twain on Belief, Fate, God, and Satan

The circumstances surrounding the towering achievements of Samuel Clemens, after humble beginnings, naturally contributed to an occasionally megalomaniacal self-image, as revealed in his correspondence with others.  Fortunately, he had a contrasting inclination to be slyly self-deprecating, and he was able to laugh at himself once in a while, which is a quite healthy and well-justified way of approaching life. 

Early in his career he had realized that ridiculing others could be an occupation met with anger and criticism in reaction, and it was often fraught with a certain measure of subtle hypocrisy.  Ridiculing the fool within is a vein that can be much more safely and profitably mined.  A collateral benefit of this is that one’s own fool is a fairly good representative of the fool in others.  All miners know that some veins are richer than others to exploit, and Mark Twain had discovered that the specific vein of absolute certitudes and ethnocentric convictions of righteous religious superiority is like the Comstock Mother Lode of folly and ludicrousness and hypocrisy.

Fate has a fickle finger, whether or not one believes in any sort of circumstantial determinism.  A particular concatenation of events led to the death of Sam’s younger brother Henry Clemens in June 1858.  Henry was in the wrong place at the wrong time when a boiler explosion on the steamboat Pennsylvania killed 250 people.  Sam had gotten Henry his job on steamboats, and Sam just happened to be aboard a different boat at the time of the disaster, so he felt anguished guilt and self-reproach on account of the death of his brother.  This tragic event contributed to his belief in randomness and luck in life, and it made him skeptical of religious claims that there is a Christian Providence. 

This terrible accident reinforced Mark Twain’s doubt as to whether a benevolent force exists in the cosmos.  These feelings eventually became subsidiary themes in his novels and written sketches and lectures.  The tragedy also contributed to his fascination with parapsychology and dreams, particularly in the wake of a dream that had foretold Henry’s death in striking detail, like a bona fide premonition.  In my personal experience, most accidents and calamities arrive without being announced, so even in the year 2010, with 2020 hindsight, it is hard to explain the principles, beyond coincidence, by which a phenomenon such as premonition might operate.

Mark Twain lived in times where definite superstitions and fears of ‘sin’ and ‘hell’ had powerful portent, and the concept of “eternal damnation” was promoted by religious authorities.  Beliefs in supernatural causes were widespread back then.  Today we might be more inclined to be skeptical, though all might agree with the novelist Joseph Conrad, who wrote in 1911:  "The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary;  men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."  Yes, indeed!

Advances in knowledge in the past century have definitively corroborated the fact that geophysical events like earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes have natural causes.  People who attribute such things to a God that is angry at some sort of moral transgressions are merely revealing deep prejudices and ignorance.  Such projections onto a deity reflect biases and anger and spite that can be the basis for real evils like ethnocentric hatreds and harsh discrimination or violence or even genocide against ethnic minorities, immigrants, poor people, women, gay men, lesbians, or those who adhere to other religious faiths.

Mark Twain had become disillusioned when he was young with New Testament teachings which asserted that those who prayed hard enough would get what they asked for.  Prayer just didn’t seem to yield results, and besides it was so self-oriented and “so ignoble” to him.  His novels convey the strength of fears and superstitions that were inspired by religion, especially among black slaves at the time.  His books also reflect the author’s suspicions that fate may be largely determined by happenstance and luck.

“Then I see a snake, a puff adder gliding along as smooth as silk.  This is the queer

   part I’m trying to tell.  I don’t shoot off like a rocket and lam out of there, I just

    lay quiet watching it come along the ground till it reaches my foot where it stops,

     surprised I’m still there, not scared or nothing…  I knowed right off it’s a sign,

      but the meaning of it was a mystery.”

                       --- The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Greg Matthews

Samuel Clemens’ mother had suffered a number of grave misfortunes in life, but she had a spirited love of life and she managed to maintain a “sunshiny disposition”, which seems to me an excellent way to be.  Later in his life, Sam was plagued by disappointments and hardships, so he harbored a conviction that the dark forces of ‘Satan’ may have more influence in human affairs than the bright forces of ‘God’.  He had an almost compulsive fascination with seemingly malevolent forces in the universe, though he recognized that bad fortune was primarily the result of circumstances, which are often made worse by the harsh and heartless inhumanity of criminals, murderers, corrupt government officials, dictators, religious fundamentalists, robber barons, ideologues, and other villains.

Mark Twain once wrote, “In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.”  He bemoaned the “decay of independent thought”.  Everyone has their own bright ideas, but they are not always exactly consonant with reality.  Most of these ideas are inherited or learned as a result of parental upbringing or church indoctrination or other forms of peer and social conditioning.  All too many people have swallowed questionably valid political ideologies and religious dogmas “hook-line-and-sinker”. 

This is why Mark Twain’s intellect and wit and irreverent satire were directed at people’s curious behaviors and the frequent folly of their actions.  His laughter at preposterous beliefs, sanctimonious piousness, narrow puritanism, literal interpretations of the Bible, and hypocrisy stem from such genial cynicism.  He had been enveloped from boyhood in a culture that was characterized by conventional propriety and Victorian modesty, yet despite this fact he personally indulged in “sinful behaviors” like smoking heaps of cheap cigars from a young age and drinking alcohol intemperately.  He fell prey to a gold rush mentality, gambled, used profane language, wrote with biting satire, and occasionally acted with distinct vindictiveness toward people he perceived as having wronged him. 

Perhaps because of his adoption of a nom de plume, Sam Clemens was fascinated with switched identities, imposters, twins, confused identities, multiple personalities, the true reality behind appearances, and relativistic uncertainties.  He explored these things in short stories like The Siamese Twins, and in novels like The Prince and the Pauper and Pudd’nhead Wilson.  His use of a pen name seems to have inspired his interest in dual personas and situational ambiguities.  It also gave free rein to his alter ego, and it may even have had the substantial effect of helping to liberate his creative nature.

Definitively defining Mark Twain is fraught with difficulty.  He was a contradictory character, so all commentaries about him are only partly true.  He had a kind of split personality:  Mark Twain was “an agnostic, almost anarchistic enemy of established everything”, as Malcolm Jones in Newsweek wrote in an article titled “Our Hippest Literary Lion”, and yet he became a bourgeois man who loved to hobnob with the rich.  In his final decade, he lived large and sumptuously, “a first-class life”, according to Michael Shelden in Mark Twain: Man in White. 

Malcolm Jones also noted a curious fact:  few people quote Mark Twain's contemporary, Walt Whitman, the man who defined the shape of American poetry, much as Mark Twain defined its prose.  Whitman once said, "Do I contradict myself?  Very well then, I contradict myself." 

The Value of Great Literature and Artistic Perspectives in Better Understandings

Since the remote days of our ancestors’ incipient awareness, human beings have strived to comprehend reality and the inexplicable, the ineffable, the implacable and the sublime.  The history of philosophical ideas and understandings can be seen as a series of stages that began as superstition, then evolved into theology, and were later explained by abstruse metaphysical abstractions.  Finally, today they are understood in a more comprehensive way through the coupling of direct experience with scientific observations and experiments and hypotheses which reflect the functioning of the world in accordance with natural causes and effects.  Our interpretations of reality help define the way we believe reality is, whether accurate or not.

    “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

                                                                             --- Albert Einstein

Great literature can provide us with deep understandings by presenting compelling ideas and universal themes and underlying motifs.  It often uses subtle but powerful symbolism.  In the days before the visual imagery of a medium like television, such themes and motifs and symbolism appealed to the imagination much more cogently than the concrete and numbing specificity of more modern forms of media with their rapid sequences of images.  Today, unfortunately, these media and our world tend to be quite obsessed with sex and violence, and the media that inform us are filled with ideology and propaganda, and too frequently they are interrupted by shallow and distracting and subliminally manipulative commercial messages.

Symbolism can be simple and transparent and allegorically plain, as it is in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, with characters like Christian, Evangelist, Obstinate, Pliable and Faithful.  It can also be complex and abstruse and even shadowy, as in Melville’s Moby Dick, wherein Captain Ahab sees an evil malignity and despair on a vast scale, and projects these feelings as an embodiment onto a great white whale. 

One of the notable aspects of Mark Twain’s novels is the symbolism contained in his stories.  The Mississippi River represented a godlike force to him.  It symbolized escape and freedom and adventure, as well as the unpredictable and impersonal forces of natural currents and fog and floods.  Like a river, the life of every person metaphorically swirls with complexity.  Unarticulated eddies and labyrinthine undertows of ambiguity and seductions of status and power and the desire for cool material things affect us.  Mark Twain recognized that each and every one of us, himself included, has comic foibles and tragic flaws and stunning failures, as well as great promise.

Naturalists and psychologists alike recognize that wisdom can be gained through insights gleaned from close observations of natural phenomena, as well as from introspections into human nature.  Time spent by a lovely river cascading out of majestic mountains, for instance, allows one to reflect on life, and may reinforce understandings of the value of going with the flow, and letting be what is, and making the best of whatever comes our way.  Breathe in slowly, and deeply, and let go.

The Jewish Buddhist Sylvia Boorstein has written, “We don’t get a choice about what hand we are dealt in life.  The only choice we have is our attitude about the cards we hold and the finesse with which we play our hand.”  Yay for positive thinking!  While hiking in areas with swift streams, it becomes clear that one must pay close attention and focus on maintaining balance and being nimble as you go.  These are good lessons in coping in life! 

“All great books are symbolical myths, overlaid like a palimpsest with the meanings

   that men at various times assign to them.”

                             --- Clifton Fadiman, in his Introduction to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

Symbolism can be an essential way of apprehending and understanding reality, because it contains a compellingly sensuous and intrinsically visual quality.  Literary symbolism can reveal much about the conscious and unconscious aspects of an author’s life experiences and passions and ways of thinking.  Symbolism is interpreted by readers according to their own personal emotions and perceptions and worldviews and biases and projections.  Thus, symbolism can be a kind of verbal ‘Rorschach test’ that evokes feelings and reveals readers even unto themselves.  In an actual Rorschach test, inkblots are used as a psychological tool to assess a person’s subjective interpretations of abstract visual images.  This reveals sometimes fascinating insights into the subject’s personality and mental projections and emotional make-up and thought processes.  Aha!

See the more extensive exploration of world literature and philosophy that is contained in the Earth Manifesto essay Inspiration, Imagination, and the Deep Well of Human Impulses. 

A Subjective Perspective of Storytelling and its Significance

Storytelling is one of the oldest creative traditions of humanity.  The telling of stories stemmed from oral histories that were passed down through many generations in various cultures, long before the invention of alphabets and the written word.  Some people wax philosophical and say that storytelling is an effort to achieve a kind of immortality.  Think about this.  Sam Clemens has achieved the enduring attention of millions of people around the world, and his writings continue to be discovered long after his death.  Many of his writings have been published posthumously in the 100 years since he died, and articles and books continue to be written about him, so in many ways he has indeed achieved a kind of immortality.

In a literal case of storytelling contributing to longer life, the famous Arabian Nights is one heck of a fantastic tale, and one that Sam Clemens held in high regard.  It is a story about a beautiful and wise and clever woman, Scheherazade, who marries a Persian king notorious for marrying a succession of virgins and then executing each of them the morning after he marries them.  He does this because his first wife committed infidelity, and he refused to let another woman be unfaithful to him.  Scheherazade tells the king compelling stories, weaving unfinished tales in such a captivating manner that night after night he is kept in thrall, eager to hear more, and more, and more, and thus he ends up sparing her life again and again for 1,001 nights. 

These tales were entertaining, but also taught morals and kindness;  they thus progressively enlightened the king, and he finally made Scheherazade his Queen.  Storytelling saved her life, staving off the premature mortality that would otherwise have been her fate at the hands of her despotic husband.  In many of the stories told by Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights, the characters are waylaid by chance and circumstance, making preordained destiny and inevitable fate seem like plausible things in which to believe.  This may have been one reason Samuel Clemens loved the stories in the Arabian Nights so much.  He found them to be amongst the most creative and original in the history of literature, and they provoked his thinking about chance and circumstance in the meandering courses of our lives.

Samuel Clemens also respected his contemporary, the novelist Charles Dickens, as well as the famous plays of the Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare.  Sam marveled at Thomas Paine’s power and fearlessness, as reflected in books like The Age of Reason.  And he loved Miguel Cervantes’ fabulous stories of the knight-errant Don Quixote who traveled around the La Mancha region of Spain on his horse Rocinante with his sidekick Sancho Panza.  Don Quixote’s ridiculous behavior tilting at windmills led to the creation of a new word, quixotic, meaning “romantic without regard to practicality”.  Ah, Dulcinea, to dream the impossible dream!

A wide variety of techniques such as the ‘frame story’ (containing stories within stories) have been used in literary composition to captivate readers.  Two of the most famous examples of the frame story are the Arabian Nights and The Canterbury Tales.  Though Mark Twain began his writing career as a journalist and a humorist and a travel writer, he later created some of the greatest American novels by using his mastery of telling stories and tall tales in his own unique kinds of frame narratives, such as the adventures of Huck Finn seeking freedom that take place during a raft journey down the Mississippi.

Mark Twain’s greatest novels are famous for his characters’ use of vernacular American speech, especially of the black culture of the South and the anything-but-genteel culture of the Wild West in the days following the Gold Rush.  Vernacular refers to the native language of a country or locality, and its use made the stories more easily accessible by the general public.  Most of the original editions of Mark Twain’s novels were extensively illustrated, giving his readers an additional way to enjoy and appreciate his works.

Mark Twain kept notebooks which he filled with observations as “his way of processing experience.”  He is known for being a keen observer and a deep philosophical thinker.  He was able to interweave his rich personal experiences, his great sense of humor, and his vivid imagination into highly entertaining stories.  His fervent brain drove him to observe astutely and to express himself both authentically and facetiously, and even sometimes eloquently.  He also had a way of writing things that are preposterous and wildly exaggerated, and he wantonly made things up.  He was quite fond of adjusting facts and exaggerating circumstances to make a good story.  His biographer Albert Bigelow Paine explained:  Mark Twain had “curious confusions of memory and imagination that more than once resulted in a complete reversal of the facts.”

A Slithering Aside on Snakes and Humor

Here is a funny passage demonstrating the wanton creativity of Mark Twain.  Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer were mischievous boys, oh, I reckon so!  They knew that women generally were not fond of snakes, and this sure warn’t something they learned in Sunday school.  Just for fun, the boys collected “a couple dozen garters and house-snakes” in a bag and hid them in a bedroom of the home of Tom’s Aunt Sally.  The snakes soon got loose:  “No, there warn’t no real scarcity of snakes about the house for a considerable spell.  You’d see them dripping from the rafters and places, every now and then;  and they generly landed in your plate, or down the back of your neck, and most of the time where you didn’t want them.  Well, they was handsome, and striped, and there warn’t no harm in a million of them;  but that never made no difference to Aunt Sally, she despised snakes, be the breed what they might, and she couldn’t stand them no way you could fix it;  and every time one of them flopped down on her, it didn’t make no difference what she was doing, she would just lay that work right down and light out… And if she turned over and found one in bed, she would scramble out and lift a howl that you would think the house was afire … Why, after every last snake had been gone clear out of the house for as much as a week, Aunt Sally warn’t over it yet;  she warn’t nearly over it;  when she was setting thinking about something, you could touch her on the back of her neck with a feather and she would jump right out of her stockings.  It was very curious.”  Ha!  Those boys were genuine rascals!

Just incidentally, speaking of tall tales and the truths they may embody, I encourage readers to check out Tall Tales, Provocative Parables, Luminous Clarity, and Evocative Truths:  A Modern Log from the Sea of Cortez.  This treatise, found in Part Three of the Earth Manifesto, advances the brilliant ideas of writer John Steinbeck in the context of my own excursion to the Sea of Cortez with a group of friends a couple of years ago.   

Note that all of the ideas in this biography are, in a sense, elaborations of the observations and philosophies that are contained in the 121 Soliloquies of the original Earth Manifesto, published in October 2004 (see Part Seven), AND of such treatises as the Part One ‘magnum opus’ of the Earth Manifesto, Comprehensive Global Perspectives: An Illuminating Worldview.  At the moment I write this, none of these writings have ever been read in full by anyone.  Make history!  The imaginative reflections in Inspiration, Imagination, and the Deep Well of Human Impulses alone will be well worth the time spent, in my humble opinion.

On Early Rising

Mark Twain did not like to get up early.  He wrote an article about the misadventures of a trip made “at an hour in the morning when all God-fearing Christians ought to be in bed.”  In this humorous sketch, titled Early Rising, As Regards Excursions to the Cliff House, he made note of the dramatic contrast between the anticipated pleasures of an early morning trip out to the beach in San Francisco and the rude actuality of the experience. 

Expectations and reality do not often coincide, as most everyone knows.  We may make plans hoping to enjoy some pleasure in them, but as travelers can attest, plans can go awry and distinctive inconveniences -- or worse -- can occur.  It turns out that unexpected and fortuitous pleasures are often of a richer variety than those we intend.  Adventures, interestingly, may be considerable inconveniences that we regard in retrospect as more noteworthy than more mundane experiences.  Things may fortuitously turn out better than we ever expected (for a while), but of course the certainty of our own personal deaths provides us with a cogent context in which to see our lives.  Philosophers point out that rather than regarding our mortality as lamentable, we should use this reminder to focus on living well and appreciating any good fortune we have, while it lasts.  Eat, drink, and be merry?!

The Narrator Within

Organization Rules!  Each of us has a narrator in our own head that occasionally recites the story of our lives.  Sometimes our narrator speaks softly;  at other times this narrator verbalizes in a booming and omniscient voice.  Sometimes the narrator imagines romance, or wistfully wishes for tender affection, or lusts lasciviously for titillating experiences.  At other times, our narrator harshly criticizes everything, or obsesses with anger or guilt.  Sometimes our narrator crumbles in chagrin after we suffer misfortunes or disappointments, or when we recollect embarrassments or excruciating humiliations or other indignities;  sometimes the narrator within us simply despairs with self-deprecating cynicism.  At other times it is just chock full of swaggering braggadocio and self-congratulations;  I, I, I, I, I;  aye yie yie yie yie!  Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf, dix, onze, douze … And sometimes the voice within just observes events with seeming detachment, or it suddenly falls silent in alert immediacy;  or it chills out in a meditative trance or a soporific state, or exults in the warm bosom of satisfying sunshine.  ‘To sleep, perchance to dream.’

A ‘Second Advent’ of Mark Twain

Imagine Mark Twain sitting in a gazebo atop a hill overlooking a river, reflecting and writing.  Amongst the many books that Mark Twain wrote is an illuminating one titled Letters from the Earth.  It was not published until 1962, well after the author’s death, because of its irreverent and satirical nature, which was considered too blasphemous and sacrilegious for the times.  Mark Twain wrote:  “We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead -- and not then until we have been dead years and years.  People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.”  

Well, well, well.  At the time Samuel Clemens wrote this, he was no doubt thinking about all the things he had written that he was afraid to publish during his life.  In Letters from the Earth, for instance, he ridicules people’s concepts of heaven with all the singing and harp playing, and the complete lack of sexual intercourse or respect for intellectual accomplishments, which are such unmistakable features of humankind’s preoccupations while they are alive.  Mark Twain made this telling comment concerning the Christian Bible:  “It is full of interest.  It has noble poetry in it;  and some clever fables;  and some blood-drenched history;  and some good morals;  and a wealth of obscenity;  and upwards of a thousand lies.”

I’d bet anything that in a new advent of Mark Twain today, he would complement observations like those made in Letters from the Earth with more modern inclusions, ones that I imagine would resemble a humorous version of the ideas contained in the essays of the Earth Manifesto, and in particular the epistle Revelations of a Modern Prophet.

“A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a battle

       of wills, and add drama to an otherwise dull day.”

                                                             --- Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

Mark Twain was very interested in geology and paleontology, so in 1871 he wrote A Brace of Brief Lectures on Science.  If Mark Twain were to be resurrected today in some sort of miraculous Second Advent, he would be startled and impressed with the advances in scientific understandings that have been made since his death, especially in the arenas of astronomy, astrophysics, geology and the electrochemical nature of the human brain.

An extensive discussion of geology precipitated out of this biography and became a new Earth Manifesto essay, Gaia’s Geological Perspective:  Episodes Since Genesis, which delves into things like the astonishing geological processes by which the Hawaiian Islands were formed, and how the gold came to be in “them thar hills”, and how marine limestone came to be a part of the world’s highest mountain range, the Himalayas.  One of the most important insights this Gaia essay contains is one that Mark Twain would have been fascinated to have been able to understand, long before geologists themselves discovered the true nature of the genesis of the beautiful volcanic Hawaiian Islands.  This is the discovery of the processes of plate tectonics and the relationship of hot spots in the Earth’s crust to the movements of the Earth’s plates and the Pacific “Ring of Fire”.  These understandings, and further reflections on the perspectives of Mark Twain which are included in Gaia’s Geological Perspective, are hereby incorporated into this biography by this reference.

Mark Twain would have loved to be able to more fully comprehend the processes by which the current Hawaiian Islands were formed, and to understand that a 4,000-mile-long chain of former Hawaiian islands, which have been eroded down to seamounts towering above the deep ocean floor, march all the way across the Pacific Ocean to even deeper sea trenches near Japan and the Kamchatka Peninsula and Alaska.  Gaia’s Geological Perspective contains a lengthy and expansive investigation into these facts and understandings.

In a Second Advent of Mark Twain, I’ll speculate that he’d probably even try to put all the scientific developments made since his death 100 years ago into an extensively articulated elaboration of modern developments in human thought, and as likely as not, he’d marry it to a satirical barrage of observations about the ridiculous follies of human nature and the pathos of the human condition, as well as the meretricious waste in our societies and the absurd nature of political corruption and neo-Gilded Age inequalities and the injustices associated with globalization and American militarism.

He would likely be extremely cynical about the ruthless U.S. imperialistic military police-state occupation of two entire nations abroad.  He had, after all, once said: 

     “An inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war.”

During Mark Twain’s extensive travels throughout his lifetime, he was deeply concerned with the exploitation of all native peoples, with the exception of American Indians whom he largely scorned, in keeping with the prejudices of the times.  He was aghast at the stupidity and barbarity rampant in his own culture.  This is one reason he opposed U.S. imperialism and jingoistic leadership.  In his anger at the brutal American conquest of the Philippines, he wrote these words in the year 1900, and they are still relevant to our country today: 

“… I have seen that we do not intend to free, but rather to subject the people …

     We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem … It should, it seems to me, be

      our pleasure and duty to make these people free, and let them deal with their

       own domestic questions in their own way.  And so I am an anti-imperialist.  I am

       opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”

In 1873, Mark Twain co-wrote The Gilded Age – A Tale of Today.  At that time, there were about 1.5 billion people on Earth.  Today there are more than 6.8 billion people alive.  What would the perceptive social critic in Mark Twain have thought of this trend, and of its attendant glaringly daunting problems?  He loved inventions, so he would be astonished at the technological advances since his day, but he was also a cynic regarding human folly.  He would likely direct his scathing sarcasm at the new set of absurdities that accompany our immoderate human activities and our aggression and the current day fundamentalist forces that so vociferously oppose sensible public family planning policies.

In a Second Advent, Mark Twain would probably suggest that we courageously dare to doubt primitive mythological conceptions of the universe, and to strive to attain greater clarity of perception and more sensible critical thinking abilities, and to cultivate social and emotional intelligence in our daily lives.  He would clothe his lessons in humor, but he would surely refute the blind beliefs of judgmental, moralistic, hypocritical, evangelical, fire-and-brimstone ideologues and their narrow-minded brethren, especially when they are focused on things that negatively affect others rather than on virtue and generosity of spirit and love and neighborly respect and theoretical Christian compassion.  And he would also, in this day and age, likely be incisively serious about the need for us to clearly recognize the intensifying impacts of our growing human needs and desires on the Earth, and thus to begin to behave with greater respect for the natural world!  

Why We Must Die

Mark Twain once wrote:  “We owe a deep debt of gratitude to Adam, the first great benefactor of the human race:  he brought death into the world.”  What the hell did Mark Twain mean by this?  I suppose it relates to the wonderfully humorous passage that is contained in the chapters about the “McSween Traveling Church of Christ the Lamb” in the great imitation Twain book, The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  That book contains startlingly entertaining episodes about the beautiful “Seven Virtues”, the daughters of Phineas and Harriet McSween:  Faith, Hope, Charity, Mercy, Constance, lovely Grace and the “pinhead” Chastity. 

“Huck, I been thinkin’ on dis here travelin’ church.  Why do you reckon dey does it?”

“Humans got a basic need for religion, Jim.  It fills in all the holes that can’t get filled in with just thinking and pondering.  There’s questions that’s too big for understanding, so folks put it all down to God and His workings.  That way they can sleep at night and not have to worry about not finding answers to the questions.”

“What kinder questions, Huck?”

“I reckon the biggest is why we got to die.  Philosophers has been asking it for hundreds of years and they ain’t got the answer yet.”

“Why do you reckon we has to die?” 

“It’s obvious, Jim.  If we never died the whole country would get cluttered up with people just getting older and older, and you know how cussed and cranky old folks is.  They’d be three or four deep everywhere, just complaining and snapping their gum and getting in the way of everyone, so they got to die to make room for them that’s young.  We get our parcel of years and when they’re done we wing it up to heaven.  That’s the theory of it.” 

Ah, instantaneous lucidification, indeed!  The next part, in Chapter 7 of The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, concerns Biblical stories of men who lived for hundreds of years, and it relates the imaginatively funny tale of the curse on the ‘Wandering Jew’.  Mark Twain himself rarely told a better tale.  In the story, Huck tells Jim that Jesus once sought directions in the Holy Land to the Mount of Olives, and a man called Cartaphilus repeatedly misleads him.  After the fourth time that Cartaphilus provides wrong directions, he cackles and pulls out a calendar and yells to Jesus, ‘April Fool!’  This causes Jesus to curse him to wander the earth and never die.  The humorous punch line is:  “… and I just bet he kicks himself every April Fool’s day.”  Ha!  -- Check it out!

Creativity, Intelligent Design and the Church

Mark Twain loved science and rational thinking, so he would have heaped praise on the amazing discoveries made in genetics in the past century.  He would have been astonished by the confirmations of Darwin’s scientific theory of evolution that have been found in the fossil record by paleontologists, as well as those discovered in the genetic record by geneticists and molecular biologists.  He would have found a vastly expanded basis for heaping ridicule on the stubborn intransigence of Creationists in their embrace of denial and ignorance and blind belief in biblical literalism. 

He would have particularly appreciated the stunning rebuke of the disingenuous dogma of “Intelligent Design” that came out of a trial in a federal court in Pennsylvania in 2005.  In this legal challenge, science teachers opposed religion-motivated members of the Dover Area School Board who had advocated the questioning of the scientific theory of evolution in biology classes.  Judge John Jones, a conservative judge who heard this widely-watched case, eventually decried the ‘breathtaking inanity’ of Intelligent Design.  He asserted that it consisted of an untestable hypothesis grounded in religion, and not in science, and that it had demonstrably been introduced for religious reasons as a form of repackaged Creationism.  With poetic irony, a month before Judge Jones ruled in this case, the voters in the Dover Area cleaned house by electing 8 out of 9 people to the school board who did not hew to the orthodox religious views that question the astonishingly extensive evidence of biological evolution.  For deeper insight into this case, watch the Nova episode, which is available on Netflix, titled Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial.

Charles Peirce’s 2009 book Idiot America – How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free discusses the Dover Intelligent Design case in Chapter Six: God and Judge Jones, as well as such idiocies as the Creation Museum in Kentucky.  The tradition of Mark Twain’s skepticism and ridicule lives on in America today!  “Like so much of the blasted landscape of Idiot America,” Pierce writes, “the Dover trial was a war on expertise …”.  Intelligent Design was being “sold in such a way that people would speak loudly and authoritatively in its support; then, enough people would believe it to make it a fact, and they would believe it fervently enough to make it true.”

Nice try, ideologues!  The efforts of churches in modern America to market themselves and their dogmas, as if in a clever sloganeering sales pitch for a “Gospel According to Wal-Mart”, have served to cheapen almost everything worthwhile about them as moral institutions.  The manipulation of the faithful into supporters of reactionary politics further makes our nation more stupid and anti-progressive, and less flexible and adaptable in dealing with epic challenges.

An Entertaining Aside

There is a good reason that Mark Twain once wrote:  “It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.”  Sam Clemens was much more familiar with the Bible than anyone I personally know, so he felt that anyone who swallows the biblical whale of a story as literal truth, rather than myth, is far more gullible than a child who fervently believes in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the medieval Boogeyman.  After even a small dose of virgin births, a worldwide flood, resurrections after death, and “there were giants in the earth in those days” 900-year-old men, most people begin to seek more metaphorical truths in their holy books, and in the ways they interpret such stories. 

Fundamentalists, astonishingly, feel that only a properly literal, inflexible and implausible belief in their doctrinal stories is adequate to demonstrate obedient faith. These are the people that get dangerous when they tread to close to the fringe.  They generally have been indoctrinated from childhood in the belief that their holy book is wholly holy, so they will blindly embrace the craziest notions and follow the most bizarre paths. 

Mark Twain’s scorn for the God portrayed in the Christian Bible is revealed in his exclamation that the Bible is “the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere.”  He had been brought up as a Presbyterian, and he regarded this faith as somewhat better than being in the mainstream of Christianity with its meddling missionaries and hypocritical faithful.  He even had a bit of forgiving pride in Presbyterian moderation, observing:  “You never see us Presbyterians getting in a sweat about religion and trying to massacre the neighbors.”  Good call!

Other Churchy Considerations

“Breathtaking inanity!”  Mark Twain, in his grave, would be envious that he did not come up with those words to describe religious fundamentalist dogmas and myths of every stripe and persuasion.  He would sigh with suppressed glee, nonetheless, at the insight-filled nature of this characterization. 

Mark Twain heaped sardonic ridicule upon those who mindlessly embraced biblical ‘certitudes’ because of the variety of conflicts such attitudes create.  He indicated in 1888 that the frivolousness of his literary work had one overriding serious purpose, which was “the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence.”  He once wrote, “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.”  Curiously, a revival of religious evangelism in the United States in the last few decades brings into question the actual effectiveness of both rational thinking and ridicule against the pitched defenses of dogmatic unreason. 

Religion often presents its doctrines as a believe-it-or-else-go-to-hell proposition.  This is absurd.  Four of the Ten Commandments, astonishingly enough -- and the FIRST FOUR -- are obsessively concerned with the proper honoring of the jealous Lord God and his holy image and Sabbath day.  Of all the possible injunctions against bad human behavior, like Thou shalt not rape, Thou shalt not sexually abuse children, Thou shalt not persecute others for their beliefs, Thou shalt not commit violence against thy spouse, and dozens of others, this God overlooked them and spent 40% of his Commandments obsessing over any person taking “the name of the Lord thy God in vain”, as if cursing or believing in some more likely truth were existential threats to ‘His’ all-powerful omnipresent existence. 

Fear and uncertainty seem to have remarkable motivating power, and this contributes to the unexpectedly strong staying power of established religions.  People have deep hopes for a caring personal God, and for a better life in some ‘hereafter’, so they are easily manipulated from tender young ages into the fold.

   “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.” 

                                                                                              --- Voltaire

The principal theme of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is that the Roman Catholic Church is ultimately an enemy of the people because it embodies the established evils of churches, especially when they manipulate religious believers for monetary and political purposes.  The Church purports to serve noble spiritual functions, but politics and power abuse subvert this purpose.  In the Connecticut Yankee, the protagonist visits ancient England and accuses the church of shoring up the ills of sixth-century society, which included foolishly superstitious beliefs, the hereditary rights and prerogatives of the nobility, extreme social inequalities, and the subservience of the masses to authority.

Established churches have extremely sordid histories of violently opposing any evolution in their dogmas, other than shrewdly deceptive ones.  The creative transmogrification of creationism into creation science and then intelligent design, for instance, was a clever ploy to try to sell an archaic mythology as science, not religion, but it was done with such blatant incompetence that it remained obviously full of holes.  Church leaders presumably think that once a part of their supposed truths are seen to be hogwash, a closer examination might be made of all their claims, even by loyal believers. 

Many thousands of women were burned at the stake during the Middle Ages by the Catholic Church for what were minor offenses that Church leaders saw as threats to their hegemony.  Galileo was confined under house arrest for the rest of his life after daring to contradict the Church’s antediluvian dogma that held that the Earth is the center of the Universe.  The Church refused to admit the error of its worldview for more than 350 years, until Pope John Paul II was finally courageous and honest enough to say that the Church had erred in condemning Galileo, and that ‘Gosh, by the way, Copernicus and Galileo were right, the Earth actually does revolve around the Sun’.

Let’s hear from the famous astronomer and philosopher himself!  Galileo Galilei stated:

 “I do not feel obligated to believe that the same god who has endowed us with

     sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.”  -- Hallelujah!

Fidelity and obedience are demanded even to the most antiquated aspects of the dogmas of churches and temples and mosques.  To be a heretic or infidel is dangerous worldwide, even today.  Mormonism makes Utah the most bone-headedly conservative state in the Union.  Sharia Islamic Law can be intensely sexist, barbaric and cruel;  for instance, Wikipedia notes that the death penalty can be applied under Sharia for the ‘crimes’ of adultery and homosexuality, and amputations of the hand can be done for the crime of theft, and flogging can be done for “fornication” and public intoxication. 

People’s adherence to religious dogmas is, in some ways, a barbarous waste of moral energy.  As John Fowles wrote in The Aristos, such misguided thinking is “like keeping ramshackle water mills on a river that could serve hydroelectric dynamos.”  Much more positive outcomes could be achieved if these formidable energies, and the enormous amounts of time and money devoted to Churches, were to be redirected into more moderate and salubrious and wholesome channels.  Imagine, for instance, if we could transcend the significant source of conflict over religious supremacy that is taking place between crusading Christianity and opposing Islam, as manifested by terrorist attacks against the U.S. and the retaliatory military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and the on-going assaults against Islamic extremists in Pakistan.  The costs of these conflicts are terribly high in a world so in need of wiser investments of money and energy.

Imagine how different the world would be if more people studied big picture, open-minded, progressive, future-respecting, insightful, enlightened ideas rather than myopic, closed-minded, repressive, shortsighted, dull, and narrowly parochial ideas!  Maybe the synapses of our brains would build new circuits and wear new grooves and snap into a new and providential set of perspectives and understandings that would revolutionarily affect our societies, making it easier for us to collectively embrace greater good goals.

Imagine if as many people studied progressive ideas as read the Bible and the Koran.  The world would arguably be a far better place if hundreds of millions of people explored and debated socially and ecologically intelligent ideas like those articulated in the Earth Manifesto, rather than studying extremely improbable stories and archaic commandments and bizarrely thin concepts.  Religious devotion may not be a barbarous waste of time and energy and money from the perspective that religions have considerable value in people’s lives for the structure and social connections they provide, and for the compensatory consolations they give to people.  And they do represent a convenient vehicle for people to express their deep spiritual needs, so they can be a good outlet for people to indulge their hopes and assuage their fears and insecurities.  But when they cross the line and contribute to progress-opposing political activities and support for politicians who rationalize harm to the environmental commons, and discriminatory biases, they must be emasculated!

A fuller exploration of religion and true spirituality can be found in the Earth Manifesto essay Revelations of a Modern Prophet.  Check it out!

Stories, Facts and Telescopic Illumination

Science and rational thinking, in contrast to religious orthodoxy, embrace ideas that are in accord with all of the evidence of experience and experiment.  Science adaptively incorporates improved understandings whenever new insights or advanced scientific instruments come along that provide more accurate ways of seeing the world.  To believe blindly, with no evidence other than the distilled and manipulative hearsay of ‘holy books’, is like taking an irrational and stultifying plunge from the battlements of reason. 

John Fowles notes in The Aristos that there may be an “emotional heroic-defiant appeal” to such stubborn adherence to indoctrinated dogma, but that it is “as if, finding myself in doubt and in darkness, I should decide, instead of cautiously feeling my way forward, to leap;  not only to leap, to leap desperately;  and not only to leap desperately, but to leap into the darkest part of the surrounding darkness.”  OMG!!

The improvement in telescopic lenses by Galileo 400 years ago, in the year 1609, first gave human beings proof that everything in the Universe does not revolve around the Earth.  Galileo observed four moons revolving around Jupiter, and this discovery helped confirm the theory, first advanced in 1543 by Nicolaus Copernicus, that the Earth revolves around the Sun rather than the other way around.  This knowledge effectively displaced the Earth from the center of the Universe in our understandings, whether we liked it or not.  The Catholic Church refused to admit this fact for centuries;  its leaders seem to have preferred to burn people at the stake for heresy for refusing to conform to their narrow and dogmatic version of reality.  Dastardly!

Telescopes and microscopes are amongst the instruments that have vastly improved our ability to see the cosmically big and the extremely small in the universe.  The insights gained from such expanded vision should not be denied merely because they contradict primitive understandings of the world.  Seeing is believing!  The photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, for instance, provide us with extraordinary pictures of things like “The Pillars of Creation” in which new stars are being incubated, and “The Perfect Storm” which reveals a hotbed of star formation, and thousands of others almost artistic visions.

The greatest advance in the resolution of telescopes since Galileo’s day was achieved after the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in April 1990, had its optics properly focused in December 1993.  The Hubble helped revolutionize our human understanding of the universe.  Its images have been used to determine the age of the universe to be almost 14 billion years.  They have confirmed the “existence and ubiquity of black holes”.  They have surprised us with new discoveries about deep space and the development and history of the universe.  They have helped us learn more about the planets in our own neighborhood of the cosmos.  They have led to a “recent revolution in human conception of the universe” which has more-or-less “done away with the old sense of a benign firmament filled with twinkling lights.  In its place looms a forbidding realm of surreal violence and weirdness.”  It is of interest to Midwestern Mark Twain fans that the 43-foot long Hubble Space Telescope is named for the Missouri-born astronomer Edwin Hubble, who was the first scientist to establish that the universe is physically expanding.

Our understandings have come a remarkably long way since the days of Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Aristotle, Copernicus and Galileo.  Ultimate mysteries, nonetheless, do remain.  We are insecure seekers of the agent behind Creation, as well as a universal purpose in existence.  Most people’s heads spin when they think too hard about these ultimate mysteries, so they tend to believe in simplistic explanations that are fervently pushed by manipulative ideologues and evangelical preachers and other characters that are often delusional. 

Every God ever conceived by human beings is an anthropocentric personification of forces and principles and influences and attributes of our own better or worser natures.  Gods are a convenient receptacle for our hopes and fears, of our need for some absolute in a relative world.  Gods provide a convenient receptacle for our spiritual impulses and prayers, our thanksgiving and our curses, and our great desires for hope and meaning, and for a belief in an afterlife to compensate for the slings and arrows of misfortune which are inevitable in this life.

Divine personifications tend to take the form of a ‘He’, or a ‘She’, like the Great Mother of primitive mankind, or the Father God of patriarchal religions, or the Goddesses of infinite love, wisdom and virtue, or the tyrant God of the Old Testament who seems to crave adulation and command obedience and sacrifice.  Mark Twain poked fun at the absurdities of this entire God-inventing business because it is so distinctly affiliated with odd rationalizations, discrimination, hypocrisies, and violent conflicts including pogroms, wars and merciless Inquisitions. 

Intelligent Athenians of 2,500 years ago understood that their gods were metaphorical personifications of forces and principles.  How could evangelicals today actually think that their anthropocentric God is a real entity, rather than a metaphorical personification?  How could people today be more gullible than in ancient times?

Science is not static like most religions, and far more extensive understandings were to be revealed by science since the days of Samuel Clemens.  Spectroscopic astrophysicists today use new instruments like mass spectrometers to prove that countless galaxies of matter are hurtling through space in a billions-of-years long unfolding of the cosmos through space and time.  People who cling to Biblical literalism, nonetheless, still obtusely and fanatically adhere to primitive Biblical explanations of our origins.  In 1650, the Irish bishop James Ussher wrote that he had traced the lineage of Jesus and the ancestral life spans given in the Bible back to the time of Adam and Eve, and he declared that God created the Universe on Sunday, October 23 in the year 4004 BC. --- Really!!!

Some Biblical literalists have blindly believed this genealogy ever since, even though such beliefs have grown increasingly ridiculous in the light of more accurate understandings.  As Mark Twain once wrote:  “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”  It is fine to “believe what you know ain’t so” -- it’s a free country! -- as long as such beliefs do not have negative impacts on others.  But the aggressive promotion of religious dogmas which condemn all non-believers forevermore is proving to be inimical to the prospects of peace and true justice on Earth.  It may even be dangerous to the survival of our species to have large segments of the population cling to primitive beliefs in denial of crucially important ecological understandings. 

Repressive and regressive forces supported by stubbornly rigid believers in religious myths are arguably having far more detrimental impacts than positive ones on our societies.  We should strive for better understandings of the emotional motives behind blockheaded inanities that insist on denying these more accurate ways of seeing the world.  This is why we must formulate public policies that encourage good education and broad-minded thinking.  It is simply becoming ever more urgent and necessary for us to solve the daunting problems facing us, and to insist on transforming our societies into fairer and more sustainable ones, and to strive with greater collective commitment to achieve a more propitious destiny. 

A Whale of an Illuminating Story

In Sam Clemens boyhood, cities were illuminated by the burning of whale oil made from the blubber of slaughtered whales.  Jonah in the Bible might have felt great vindication at the poetic retribution of this development, because surely Jonah was mortified at having been swallowed alive by a whale back in the days of old.  I’m just speculating, because if Jonah was anything like the God of the Old Testament, he could easily have held a grudge against an entire species throughout all of eternity for the supposed wickedness of a single action.  Forgiveness does not seem to have been in fashion then;  after all, the whale had “vomited out Jonah upon the dry land”, and some of the whales’ descendents might have been given some small break for that consideration, instead of having been mercilessly hunted by mankind nearly to extinction in the last two centuries.  I suppose that the experience was extremely ignominious for Jonah, to have been swallowed whole and then be required to spend the biblical interregnum of three days, cramped and clammy in the belly of “a great fish”, before being resurrected in so rude a way at God’s direction!

Ironies certainly abound in our world.  Urban and rural illumination is achieved today by using electric lighting, not whale oil, and most electricity is generated by burning coal, oil, and natural gas.  Good God! --- Here we are using fossil fuels formed from fractious deposits of organic matter that originated in ancient geologic Periods like the swampy Carboniferous (an era 345 million to 280 million years ago), and yet 50% of people in the United States still claim that they don’t believe in evolutionary change!

The most basic fact about the Universe is that everything changes.  Everything is in constant motion.  Countless galaxies are hurtling through space, as if away from some colossal explosion of initial genesis.  These galaxies consist of hundreds of billions of giant balls of burning matter.  Planets and asteroids and comets and other stellar debris orbit around each burning star, just as our home planet and a bunch of other stuff orbits our Sun.  The atmosphere of the Earth is also in motion;  winds and air currents and jet streams and gaseous agitation are continuous phenomena.  Oceans are in motion with undulating waves and flowing currents and turbulent upwellings.  Even the crust of the Earth moves slowly in giant slabs called “tectonic plates”;  volcanoes and earthquakes reveal the continuous nature of subterranean forces at work that cause such movements.  Every electron of every atom of every molecule of everything on Earth is in motion.

Motion is change.  Everything is thus changing all the time.  All things change, ironically, in accordance to unchanging ‘laws’ of nature that are described by physics and geology and chemistry and mathematics.  This irreversible sequence of altering matter through time and space can be described as evolution.  The physical evolution of the Earth is evidenced in the forming and lithification of sedimentary rocks, fossilization, mountain building, erosion, glaciations, weathering, volcanism and sudden earth movements.  Geophysical changes like this demonstrate the continuous evolution of our home planet. 

Charles Darwin’s scientific theory of biological evolution through natural selection grew out of the recognition that all forms of life are found nearly perfectly adapted to the conditions pertaining in the habitats and ranges where they live.  This adaptation of life to various changing ecological niches is compelling evidence of biological evolution. 

It astonishes me that half of all Americans say they don’t believe in the evolution of life.  What sophistry!  (Sophistry is superficially plausible reasoning that is actually fallacious, like much of that which characterizes the doctrines of the religious right.)  It is stunning that so many people deny modern understandings simply to cling to primitive myths and beliefs. 

In April 2009, many people were fearful that an outbreak of ‘swine flu’ in Mexico would spread into a global epidemic.  This flu virus was widely understood to be one that was mutating.  No matter how fervently we stick our heads in the sand, the factual evolution of this virus can strike us, and this antigen can make an end-run around our miraculously well-adapted immune defenses, whether or not we believe in evolution or deny its almost certain probability.  Rapidly mutating varieties of flu viruses strike fear into our hearts, and yet religious fundamentalists still deny that life forms change?!

Clearer thinking is critically important at this juncture in human affairs.  Mark Twain was particularly sensitive to the personal peculiarities of the human animal, making note of people’s remarkable sincerity of self-deceit and their amazing propensity to indulge in self-justifications and foolish follies and astonishing leaps of faith.  Can’t we restructure our societies in recognition of these aspects of human nature, and through a process of wise understanding, achieve the goal of creating more sensible, fairer, more peaceful and more sustainable societies?  (Yes, we could;  and Yes, we should!)

Let us shake ourselves awake, elevate our sights, and momentarily escape the workaday cares that command our attention and practically devour our souls.  We are like quixotic knights absurdly tilting at quiescent windmills, mistaking them for monstrous giants and hoping for glory in combat and vanquishment, but as likely as not such distorted vision will result with us in a sorry condition, like it did with Don Quixote upon the La Mancha plain.

The Big Picture

We live in a world of universal hazard, with Chaos pitted against Order.  In this situation, “the whole” is indifferent to every individual thing in it.  In this whole, nothing is unjust or good or bad;  all is relative.  Things are fortunate or unfortunate to one individual or another, but not to the whole.  One person’s gain is often another person’s loss.  Nature is supremely and completely indifferent to outcomes.  For instance, when a meteor slammed into the earth 65 million years ago, causing the Cretaceous Extinction that wiped out the majority of living organisms on the planet, this catastrophe was certainly a severe misfortune for almost every individual and species of life at the time.  But it proved to be propitious for the descendents of the survivors, who were able to exploit the opportunities inherent in the altered conditions and the reduced competition, and these plants and animals evolved into millions of new species, including all of our ancestors. 

Today, a new wave of mass extinctions is taking place.  These extinctions are being caused by habitat destruction and over-harvesting and pollution and climate change.  These developments threaten our own collective well-being.  No God will save us from this assault;  no one can save us but ourselves.  We should admit this, and commit ourselves to taking appropriate steps!  Hear me now!  “Lend thine ear to what I do relate.”

The writer Nikos Kazantzakis imagines Jesus giving his first sermon on a hill above a lake in Galilee.  “Forgive me, my brothers, but I shall speak in parables”, he said.  “The sower went out to sow his field, and as he sowed, one seed fell on the road and the birds came and ate it.  Another fell on stones, found no soil in which to be nourished, and withered away.  Another fell on thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it.  Finally, another fell on good soil;  it took root, sprouted an ear, brought forth grain and fed mankind.  He among you who has ears to hear, let him hear!”

On Racism and Folly

Hear me now, as I turn to important perspectives on issues of the day, from which Mark Twain was too courageous to shy away.  Sam Clemens’ home State of Missouri became the twenty-fourth State in the Union on August 10, 1821.  It entered the Union as a “slave state” as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which admitted Maine as a “free state” to maintain the political balance between slave and free states in the growing conflict between the North and South.  Sam was accustomed to the seeming normalcy of domestic slavery in his family and in the society of his boyhood.  Even though the institution of domestic slavery was a bit more benign than the harsh farm slavery of the Deep South, slaves could still be beaten in Missouri for any reason.  Slave owners routinely sold slave families asunder, according to the will and exigencies and prerogatives of those who owned slaves, like Sam’s father.  The Civil War pitted slavery abolitionists against those who fervently defended the conventional rights of “property owners”, and many people in the Missouri of Clemens’ youth regarded abolitionists as low-down radicals and subversives who threatened established slave-owner rights.

It took considerable courage of conviction and fair-mindedness, in light of these facts, for Mark Twain to confront the issue of racism that was implicit in the institution of slavery.  He did this as Huckleberry Finn in the famous novel in which Mark Twain’s young hero-narrator Huck and the good-hearted and avuncular runaway slave Jim escape together down the Mississippi River on a raft. 

“There was another book I writ before this one which gives the story about how me

and Jim went down the river on a raft, him looking for freedom on account of he’s a nigger slave and me looking to get away from the Widow Douglas who’s trying to sivilize me, and you could say we both wanted the same thing.”

                                   --- The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Greg Matthews

Ha!  I once saw a hysterical and astutely-composed comedy routine by Chris Rock that was delivered in Johannesburg, South Africa.  He does a riff about the context in which words are used, like the word “nigger”, which Mark Twain had used in his novels to such great controversy.  Chris Rock exclaims, “Shit, last year the NAACP had a funeral for the word "nigger"!”  He provides many exclamatory contexts in black culture in which the use of the word “nigger” is actually quite appropriate, but he repeatedly poses the question, “Can white people ever say the word “nigger”?”  The repeated refrain in his routine, in answer to this question, is again and again, “NOT REALLY!!!”  This part of the comedy routine ends with one funny context in which, in fact, it may be appropriate!

The United States now has an articulate and extremely intelligent black man who is President, and also a black man who is Attorney General.  It is high time that we grapple more honestly with the serious issues of racism that are still distinctly embedded in our societies.  Ethnocentric prejudices live on, but we must transcend them as we did with the issues of slavery and the right of women to vote, and the repeal of Jim Crow laws, the so-called “miscegenation” between whites and blacks, and the changing attitudes toward strictures against cohabitation of unmarried couples.  Sexism and discrimination against gay men and lesbians must also be addressed, and the fairness principles of our Constitution must be extended to include the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for ALL!

Perhaps emblematic of the shift of attitudes toward lesbians and gay men today, despite the glacially slow pace of such social changes, are two bumper stickers that I recently saw:

    HATE is Not

      A Family Value

             --- Bumper Sticker, 2009 

         I’m Straight,

           But Not Narrow

                --- Bumper Sticker, 2010

Reflections on Patriotism

One way that ethnocentric biases are expressed is through nationalism and extreme patriotism.  Again Mark Twain was ‘right on’ when he noted:

“My kind of patriotism and loyalty is loyalty to one’s country, and not to

   one’s institutions or officeholders.” 

In truth, patriotism in America should be an honest commitment to the principles and ideals that this country really represents.  This includes the primary concerns of our Founding Fathers:  fairness, freedom, justice, human rights, honesty, limited government intrusiveness, and the fair representation of the best interests of the nations’ citizens.  It still irks me that George Bush and Dick Cheney and the Republican apparatchik perverted patriotism into a caricature of righteousness in which opposing opinions and dissent were torturously oppressed in order to advance corporatism, inegalitarianism, anti-environmentalism, aggressive militarism, social repression, patriarchal dominion, evangelical Christianity, and right-wing ascendancy.  As Mark Twain observed, an attitude of “My country, right or wrong” was an insult to the nation!

In the biggest picture context, if Mark Twain were alive today, being the Big Thinker that he was, I feel strongly that he would be a strong advocate of two things:  (1) a new brand of foreign policy based on social justice, fairer competition, greater efforts to achieve peaceful coexistence, the freedom of religion, and a more committed striving to be better neighbors;  and (2) a transformation in our domestic policies to make them more just, more humanitarian, more long-term oriented, and more ecologically sane.  He would probably say that the best hope of humanity is to find more effective ways of cooperating together to solve the epic and serious challenges that we face.

A Revealing Sidebar Concerning Revelations on Walks in Nature

Mark Twain was in San Francisco in 1865 when a moderately powerful earthquake struck.  He wrote in Roughing It, “…at that moment a third and still severer shock came, and as I reeled about on the pavement trying to keep my footing, I saw a sight!  The entire front of a tall four-story brick building on Third street sprung outward like a door and fell sprawling across the street, raising a dust like a great volume of smoke!”  Later, he wrote a humorous piece in which he observed:  “I will set it down here as a maxim that the operations of the human intellect are much accelerated by an earthquake.”  Run!!

A better understanding of the cause of earthquakes can be gained today by taking a walk along the “Earthquake Trail” near the Bear Valley Visitor Center in Point Reyes National Seashore, not far north of San Francisco.  The half-mile long trail follows the famous San Andreas Fault, which is a ‘transform fault’ that roughly marks the boundary between where the Pacific Plate is today moving northwest relative to the North American Plate.  A rupture line is still visible from the 1906 “Big One” earthquake that partially destroyed San Francisco.  An old fence marches down the hill in Point Reyes and then abruptly continues on a parallel trajectory about 20 feet to the north where it had jumped in a few seconds back in 1906.  A story at the time alleged that the rupture had swallowed a cow in what was then an extensive dairy farming area, but this may be an apocryphal tale like so many that spring up in the minds of human beings.  Sample rocks have been placed on the east side of the Earthquake Trail that are characteristic of the mélange that typifies the North American Plate, and distinctly different sample rocks that are characteristic of the Pacific Plate have been placed on the west side of the trail. 

Last year, not far from the Earthquake Trail, I went on a long nature hike with a slender and attractive friend of mine, and it turns out that she had recently begun to follow a path less taken;  and it is making a whale of a difference in her life.  We followed a trail up to the “Spiritual Drivers Seat of the Bay Area” on distinctive Mt. Tamalpais.  This is a natural chair formed of serpentine rock in an outcropping from which a commanding view can be seen of Mount Diablo, the East Bay, Mt. Hamilton, San Francisco and the entire region to the east and south.  A short distance away along the ridge, we stopped at the stone bench dedicated to Dad O’Rourke, which has a similar view but also includes the Farallon Islands to the west.  It was one of those startlingly clear days when God seems to have moved these fabled islands closer to the coast under cover of the dark of night.  A plaque set on the bench in 1927 records a quote from Dad O’Rourke on the occasion of his birthday that reads:  “Give me these hills and the friends I love.  I ask no other heaven.”  Bravo!

As we approached the Dad O’Rourke’s stone bench, we saw a boldly-marked rattlesnake enjoying the warm late-March sunshine in a chink in the rocks.  Since these animals are quite territorial, it is likely that the snake hangs out there a lot.  My friend told me she had never actually heard a rattlesnake rattle, which is a sound that inspires fear deep in our limbic brains, so I agitated the snake a bit and it slowly stirred awake, coiled, rattled a warning, and slithered back into the recesses of the stone bench in retreat.  

We continued our hike along the ridge and cross-country down to Cataract Creek, which is a beautiful chortling mountain stream in March.  We crossed the stream a half mile above the point where the water begins a rapid descent down fabulous waterfalls and cataracts into a lovely succession of pools, and we ascended through a forest of oak and madrone and fragrant California bay laurel trees past a green meadow and up onto a ridge where endemic Marin Manzanita and Sargent Cypress grow.  Years ago, some hard-working soul had constructed two large stone seats on this ridge, and they are locally known as “The Throne”.  The site has great views toward the Point Reyes peninsula and the line of the San Andreas Fault that is Tomales Bay and the distant Bodega Head. 

After enjoying the view, we hiked over to a place named Barth’s Retreat where we had a tasty picnic in the warming sunshine.  My enthusiastic friend talked at length about the wholesale changes in circumstances that have been taking place in her personal life, and the effects these challenging changes have had on her psyche and relationships, and we philosophized at length.  But that’s another story.

Here’s a curious part that I’m trying to tell.  A snake must have somehow slithered into my friend’s daypack during our delicious repast, for she reported that, later in the day after taking a refreshing shower, she was startled to discover a coiled serpent next to her pack inside her home.  She managed to capture the snake without harming it, and she released it outdoors into a nearby Open Space, making note that the snake had a bright orangish-yellow ring around its neck and the same coloration along its entire belly.  That description identifies it as a harmless Ringneck Snake, but in the moment all she could think and exclaim was “Yikes!” and “Holy cow!!”.  One can well imagine!  Was it some sort of a sign?  (And if so, what pray tell did it signify?!)

Some say that “Everything happens for a reason”.  I particularly hate to hear this maxim right after being smitten by some painful misfortune!  This saying has been extrapolated into an uplifting “Author Unknown” philosophical ditty which enumerates the truly valuable lessons that one can learn from adversities -- which concludes with a message that we should live in the moment and give forgiveness and unconditional love.  Hallelujah!  But let’s examine the meaning of this conventional belief, as it is often used.  All effects, of course, do have causes.  But in the sense that this saying is generally used, it is simply superstition and prejudice.  For instance, when New Orleans was severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina, religious bigots claimed that the reason for the destruction was that Ellen DeGeneres, a New Orleans native, was a lesbian, and God was presumably venting his anger at homosexuals.  Really? 

Long ago, when Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake on All Saints Day, November 1, 1755, killing tens of thousands of people, religious leaders attributed the calamity to God’s anger at sinners, claiming that this was ‘His’ punishment.  The reasons that are often attributed to happenings generally reflect the sometimes malicious biases of the observer rather than more probable and sensible explanations!

What a world!  Can’t we all just get along?!

When Nikos Kazantzakis wrote his version of the Odyssey, he rewrote it repeatedly to broaden “its scope, until it came to include all he had ever seen and heard and thought.”  It was not my intention to report overly-exhaustively on barely-related digressive details in this biography, like some twitter-enamored reporter, so I’ll return to the ‘red meat’ of this story of Mark Twain’s life.

Observations from the Gilded Age

Okay, okay, I have digressed;  this is a biography of Mark Twain, who was by far the most successful travel writer of his time.  Travel writing suited him well, according to the late professor Richard Bridgman, because it freed him “to use his special literary gifts: short bursts of pointed observations, anecdotes, episodes, and tales.  He could examine the diversity of the world without worrying overmuch about such matters as consistency or transitions.”  Thanks to “the sequence of the journey itself,” the narratives have “at least a simulacrum of coherence.” 

Mark Twain's groping thoughts and digressions parallel the way our minds think, with intricate courses taken by discursive consciousness.  According to Bridgman, the ostensible order of the world “remained tantalizingly elusive for him”.   But today we have the wonderful opportunity to easily gain more accurate understandings of our world.  This is a reason that my own ideas and explorations and observations have been so extensively set forth in the Earth Manifesto. 

People could so easily know more, and our world would be a better place if we did, and it is my goal to share my perspectives in hopes that they will lead to a fairer world.  This is why I regard the transformational ideas in Part Four of the Earth Manifesto to be so important.  Check them out!

Mark Twain had coined the term The Gilded Age in a collaborative novel with essayist Charles Dudley Warner in 1883.  He did so partially out of his deep concern with the politics, economics and political corruption of the era.  During the materialistic times of the Gilded Age, things like large homes with Victorian Gothic Revival architecture were considered to be reflections of intellectual and moral worth.  The rich indulged in conspicuous consumption during that era, and this contributed to a perception recognizing the severe injustices of unregulated capitalism and the detrimental aspects associated with it, including its excesses and abuses and exploitation and waste.  This sparked muckraking exposés and the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century.  Important reforms were made as a result, to combat unfair monopoly practices and long working hours and child labor and unsafe working conditions and sexual harassment and corruption and discrimination and the oppressive growth of the ruthless conglomerate power of corporations.

Disparities of wealth today have grown to be nearly as large as they were during the Gilded Age of which Mark Twain wrote in the late nineteenth century.  At that time, industrialists and financiers and ‘robber barons’ dominated American society.  Mark Twain decried rapid increases in economic inequality, describing them as “the Great Barbeque". 

The policies that led to this outrageous concentration of income and wealth sparked a vast reform movement in reaction.  But it was not until decades later, when the Great Depression made the failings of capitalism starkly clear, that economic collapse and massive labor and social unrest forced the country's political elite to take actions to make society fairer and to embrace policies that led to a larger and healthier middle class and a reduction in the concentration of income and wealth.  (Time for more such actions!!)

The ethical standards of American business have never been notably high.  Referring to widespread corporate corruption, Mark Twain stated in 1905:  “We gave the world the spirit of liberty more than one hundred years ago, and now we are giving the world the spirit of graft.”

In the past 30 years, since Ronald Reagan happened upon the national political scene, an expanding inegalitarian trend has once again become dominant.  The reasons for this are that corporations and investors have been given greater power and more prerogatives, and they have been subjected to fewer regulations and lower marginal tax rates.  Simultaneously, organized labor has been crushed as a counterforce that could help balance out corporate power and unbridled greed.  American workers have been deprived of being allowed to share in significant productivity gains, and their ‘real wages’ (after inflation is taken into account) have declined for decades.  Workers have been subjected to less job security and fewer healthcare benefits and poorer retirement benefits, especially in the past ten years.  Meanwhile, the richest 1% of Americans has seen their fortunes increase fabulously.

Labor unions, like businesses and government, have had notorious episodes of corruption and bureaucratic idiocies and market distortions throughout the Industrial Revolution.  But unions have been a somewhat effective aspect of a free market economy that help give workers a fairer shake.  Unions contributed substantially to the growth of a socially desirable middle class in the decades after World War II. 

Labor unions could once again today become one of the most effective forces in stopping systemic labor-law violations and in reining in absurd levels of executive pay.  A stronger labor movement could be one of the best ways to advance a progressive agenda consistent with our founding American principles of liberty, equality, justice and democratic representation.  The Employee Free Choice Act which has been under consideration by Congress for a year would likely help to rectify the increased worker injustices that have taken place since 1980. 

Globalization complicates this situation.  And stubborn ideologies confuse the issues.  The high costs and distortions created by public employee unions and the practices of pension-spiking have given unionization a negative connotation in the minds of many.  It is time that we dealt sensibly and fairly with all of these issues, in the interests of the greater good.

Observations about Empire and Propriety

Another important aspect of Mark Twain’s involvement in political affairs was his participation as an outspoken member of the Anti-Imperialist League, which was the first national American peace movement.  Mark Twain was outraged at politicians who unethically capitalize on national tragedies to push through unrelated agendas.  The battleship USS Maine was hit by mysterious and still unexplained explosions in the harbor of Havana in February 1898, killing 260 people.  Soon thereafter, the United States intervened militarily in Cuba and the Philippines, so some say that this may have been a type of ‘false flag’ operation. 

Mark Twain, in his anger at the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, wrote these words in the year 1900, adduced earlier in this biography and repeated here because of their profound relevance to our country today: 

“… I have seen that we do not intend to free, but rather to subject the people …

     We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem … It should, it seems to me, be

      our pleasure and duty to make these people free, and let them deal with their

       own domestic questions in their own way.  And so I am an anti-imperialist.  I am

       opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”

A further elaboration of Mark Twain’s ideas in this regard is contained in the Earth Manifesto’s Reflections on War, an essay that discusses ‘false flag operations’.  Such ruses are a type of perfidious activity that have been repeated periodically in U.S. and world history.  A discussion of other possibly more definitive instances of false-flag operations are included in Reflections on War, like the sinking of the RMS Lusitania by a German submarine in 1915, which led to the U.S. getting involved in World War I, and the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to our nation’s involvement in the Vietnam War.  Some people suspect that the 9/11 attacks may also have been a kind of precipitated exploitation of events to get our nation involved in extremely costly military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.  Costly, but hugely profitable for a few!

A correspondent named John Nichols notes:

Mark Twain was no fan of war, which he described as ‘a wanton waste of projectiles’, and he nurtured a healthy disdain for anyone who suggested that patriotism was best displayed through enthusiastic support for military adventures abroad.  The phrase ‘our country, right or wrong’ was, he argued, ‘an insult to the nation’.

But Twain’s deepest disgust was reserved for politicians who played on fear and uncertainty to promote the interests of what would come to be known as the military-industrial complex.  Describing how Americans were frequently goaded into war by their leaders, Twain recalled: ‘Statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them;  and thus he will by-and-by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.’

  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“The radical of one century is the conservative of the next.  The radical invents

   the views.  When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.”

                                                                                                    --- Mark Twain

  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Samuel Clemens Opinion on Women

“The sun rose upon a tranquil world, and beamed down upon the peaceful village

      like a benediction.”                                 --- Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Mark Twain had a paradoxical character, and lived in curious times.  Victorian sensibilities were rather puritan and conformist, so it is interesting that he was able to rise above the inborn prejudices of his times to eventually oppose slavery and to regard women with sometimes enlightened perspective.  He wrote the following in his Notebook in 1895:

“We easily perceive that the peoples furthest from civilization are the ones where equality between man and woman are furthest apart -- and we consider this one of the signs of savagery.  But we are so stupid that we can’t see that we thus plainly admit that no civilization can be perfect until exact equality between man and woman is included.”

Samuel Clemens had aspired to become a part of the respected Eastern gentility, despite his lower class origins and his tawdry Wild West experiences and his harsh and humorous ridicule of pretentiousness.  He met a slender and attractive girl named Olivia Langdon in December 1867 at a reading of scenes from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, and he was immediately smitten with her charms.  Olivia was the sister of Charles Langdon, one of the fellow passengers on his voyage aboard the Quaker City.  She was well-educated, sophisticated, and genteel.  She came from a wealthy family that lived in Elmira, New York, and was a fine representative of the Victorian upper class.  The Victorian Age was one in which the favored feminine look and attitude was the demure, the shy, and the obedient, and Livy was embodied this, as well as being wise and intelligent.

Sam began to court her, hoping to gain her hand in marriage, but his stature at the time was too coarse and insignificant, and he was known to be too irreverent at the time he met her for her religious sensibilities.  Since Sam had come from a family that was quite poor, his hardscrabble struggle to make money and to gain respectability and fame was a distinct aspect of his endeavors and compulsions.  After his book The Innocents Abroad was published and achieved success, Olivia agreed to marry him, and he remained married to ‘Livy’ for 34 years until she died in 1904.

Though Mark Twain had gained his early renown as a humor writer, this was regarded as somewhat of a low and disreputable form of writing.  Once he married Livy, he strived to be more respectable and to write books with more gravitas and literary value.  Livy acted for decades as a kind of editor of the tone and content in his writings. 

A writer named Fitz Hugh Ludlow had suggested to Mark Twain in 1865 that he focus on his humor rather than straight news writing.  Soon thereafter that he sent a letter to his brother Orion, saying “I have had a call to literature, of a low order -- i.e. humorous.  It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit.”  It was just a few weeks later that Twain’s humorous piece The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County made him nationally known and launched his epic literary career.  “He’d hit upon his most marketable talent, with the aid of Ludlow’s advice, and possibly hashish, too,” noted Ellen Komp in a recent article.

She was referring to the fact that Mark Twain used hashish when he lived in San Francisco in 1865.  Concentrated cannabis was commonly available in drug stores at the time.  Twain’s friend Fitz Hugh Ludlow was a well-known author of the 1857 book The Hasheesh Eater.  Ludlow had found hashish to be a boon to his creativity.  He gave high praise to Mark Twain in a newspaper article, observing:  “In funny literature, that Irresistible Washoe Giant, Mark Twain, takes quite a unique position. … He makes me laugh more than any Californian. … He imitates nobody.  He is a school by himself.”

Note that many Americans have used cannabis, including a long list of well-known comedians and humorists.  In this context, consider again Mark Twain’s comment that, “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.”  With so many of our luminaries admitting to having used this herbal inspiration, it is high time that we tear down the harsh, divisive, counterproductive, and extremely costly prohibition against cannabis. 

Marijuana was made illegal in 1937 based on lies, distortions, and the influence of so-called yellow journalism.  An ambitious bureaucrat named Harry Anslinger was responsible for this criminal law.  Today, even with medical marijuana movements having passed partial legalization initiatives in 16 states, the federal government is still aggressively prosecuting marijuana users.  It is time to revise the laws related to marijuana use, and particularly to reclassify it so that it is not a Schedule 1 Controlled Substance that supposedly has a high potential for abuse and “no currently accepted medical uses.”

Sliding toward a Conclusion

Mark Twain, like fellow American author Jack London, was amongst the relatively small number of writers who achieved significant monetary success during their lives.  Both of them had an adventurous spirit, an observant brain, a good memory, a vivid imagination, lucid dreams, and the inspiration to express their experiences and perceptions and ideas.  Both of them also managed to squander enormous amounts of money on large expensive houses and to make bad judgments in speculative risks.  At least Mark Twain was able to live in his costly mansion in Hartford, Connecticut for many years;  Jack London, in contrast, spent a fortune on a 15,000 square foot stone mansion on his ‘Beauty Ranch’ above Glen Ellen in the Sonoma Valley north of San Francisco, but he never got to live in it.  Jack had stated:  "My house will be standing, Act of God permitting, for a thousand years." 

Ironically, God apparently had other plans, for the so-called Wolf House was destroyed by a fire just days before Jack and his wife Charmian were to move in, after they had spent three years on its construction.  The cause of the fire was never definitively determined.  The impressive ruins still stand on the hillside estate and farm that are now a beautiful State Historic Park.  A recent land acquisition has protected acreage all the way up to the ridge and summit of Sonoma Mountain.

Mark Twain invested and lost an equivalent of $4 million in a ‘Paige Typesetting’ machine that was never brought to commercial success.  Despite his substantial earnings, he was beset by bad investments and financial problems, and in 1894 his publishing firm was forced to declare bankruptcy.  He and his wife Livy traveled and lived abroad for eight years because it was cheaper, due to a strong dollar in those years.  He finally got out of debt by earning money from writing and lecturing extensively during his travels.

Samuel Clemens had his idiosyncrasies, sure enough, but then again, so do I have mine, and you yours!  He once wrote, perhaps somewhat disingenuously, “I don’t care anything about being humorous, or poetical, or eloquent, or anything of that kind -- the end and aim of my ambition is to be authentic.”  Really?!  The conventional and the renegade actually seem to have struggled mightily in Mark Twain, and he toned down his satire against religion and his authenticity and his language in many instances.  His upper-class wife Livy acted as his editor in recommending what language and topics to self-censor for respectability, and to ensure popularity. 

Certain aspects of his authenticity do shine through in his writings, like his scathing sardonic humor, his occasional eloquence, and his propensity to exaggerate wildly.  He was driven by the impulse for expression as well as many attendant underlying motivations.  He also had an often urgent need to make money to support his family and his somewhat extravagant lifestyle and his properties and servants and investments.  On the whole, he is one of the most fascinating characters in our nation’s history.  His great literary accomplishments have led to him being referred to as “the Lincoln of our literature”, for he, like Abraham Lincoln, made a spectacular rise from humble beginnings to international prominence. 

Mark Twain would likely have appreciated the word invented by a Washington Post reader:  “Sarchasm, n.  The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person that doesn’t get it.”  Ha!  As Henry Miller once wrote, “Profundity and nonsense have certain unsuspected affinities”.  I can easily imagine readers reacting to some of my words with real sarcasm, or at least with cynical ridicule, as for instance this paragraph from my ‘Germinating’ file:  “Thoughts and ideas, imbued with personal philosophies, percolate in the interstices of my mind, as if marinated in an intense infusium of bodily and perceptual and cultural impressions and interpretations and perspectives.  Smile!  Laugh!!  It does one good.  You know what I mean?”

Or this:  “Readers, with various motivations, live vicariously through great minds like those of Mark Twain and Jack London.  They allow themselves to be immersed in descriptive stories of struggle, adventures, alternative realities, fable, mystery, poetic perspective, suspense, delight, drama, philosophy, and a thousand other shades of influence.”  Well, what if it’s true.  So what?!  “Let it be!”

Personal Reflections

The Big Dipper and the constellation Cassiopeia bear mute but eternally majestic witness to all the events that transpire in the northern hemisphere of our home planet.  The stars in these constellations appear to rise and set every night, each opposite the other, and they appear to circumscribe a circle around the North Star.  There is a reason for this, which involves the axis of the earth’s North Pole and the Earth’s daily rotation, but I may be forced to absquatulate and figuratively “light out for the territories” if I keep providing these explanations like a real nowhere gal sitting in a nowhere land making all my nowise explanations for nobody.  Who cares?! 

It is mighty hard to find frontiers these days to which one can absquatulate.  Besides, whereas the impulse was powerful for Samuel Clemens to achieve fame and recognition and praise, my own preference is to enjoy my good fortune in life and to remain personally anonymous.  I have had remarkable success at this, so far! 

Sam Clemens noted during the writing of his first successful book that he had no expectations that many people would actually read The Innocents Abroad, so he felt a considerable “freedom from restraint” in expressing himself.  “The idea that nobody is listening,” he wrote, “is apt to seduce a body into airing his thoughts with a rather juvenile frankness.”  I know the feeling!  (And YAY! for the freedom of expression!)

Mark Twain hobnobbed with colorful characters and rich people and many dignitaries and even European royalty during his lifetime.  I’m sure those activities had their marvelous merits and advantages.  He gained widespread fame during his life and was prominent in American literary circles for more than 40 years.  He worked or socialized with such notables as Bret Harte, Artemus Ward, William Dean Howells, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, Harriet Beecher Stowe and many others. 

Mark Twain’s Vivacious “Angelfish"

Samuel Clemens did have distinct eccentricities.  For instance, here is a little known fact:  in his old age, he had a grandfatherly obsession that led him to associate chivalrously and maybe just a tiny bit pathologically with young girls.  He formed an ‘Aquarium Club’ with girls between the ages of 10 and 16.  He called these surrogate granddaughters his “angel-fish”.  He loved their company, and was able to live vicariously through their enthusiasms.  Perhaps they also reminded him of his long-felt deep infatuation with the sweet and innocent Laura Wright, who was only 14 years old when he met her on a steamboat en route to New Orleans when he was 22 years old.

Mark Twain liked girls who were pretty, sincere, straightforward, vivacious, naïve, frank and enthusiastic.  He just loved purity and innocence and nobility of character.  Sam Clemens was also probably trying to assuage his lonely heart in the later days of his Mark Twain persona after his wife Livy and daughter Susy had died.  An interesting online summary of “Mark Twain’s Angel-Fish Roster and other young women of interest” provides information about these girls and the roles they played in his life, together with old photos of them. 

There seems to be some sort of Gravity of Attraction of older males to younger females in our societies, then and now.  Today, this attraction carries significantly less innocence, and this fact makes it important that we embrace both progressive and protective principles toward our daughters and young people in general.

Samuel Clemens began extensive dictations of his autobiography in 1906.  “The entire exercise encouraged his egotism and his love of showing off”, wrote Everett Emerson, a biographer, in an alliterative observation in Mark Twain – A Literary Life.  Audaciously, it soon thereafter came to pass that Mark Twain began to wear his signature white suits even in the winter time.  His boasting and craving of attention and compliments were offset at times by periods of moodiness and lonesomeness and melancholy. 

At times his written expressions were characterized by “half-insane tempests and cyclones of humor.”  Some of his biographers point out that he became more bitter, pessimistic, cynical, deterministic, and even misanthropic in his outlook as he advanced into old age, but I like to think that he merely became more passionate in his conviction that the forces of nature are ruthlessly impersonal, and that human follies frequently lead to adverse consequences, and that life will likely smite us all with seemingly cruel heartlessness, as it did him, before we die.  Many are the indignities associated with getting old!  Oh, well, “C’est la vie!”

Michael Shelden in his 2010 book Mark Twain: Man in White – The Grand Adventure of His Final Years, portrays Mark Twain in a different light, making it clear that the author was very proud of his works, and of his life, as well.  He suffered a debacle of treachery when his trusted assistants Isabel Lyon and Ralph Ashcroft took advantage of his trust to try to secure their own futures at his expense.  This episode makes a compelling tale, and reveals that Mark Twain was a man “who wore his passions on his sleeve, and who cares too much about the truth to let it be obscured by half-truths and lies.”

Mark Twain’s extensive musings on human nature were not unified in any one definitive philosophy.  Fatalistic determinism was distinctly reflected in his writings like "What Is Man?" and "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg".  His sometimes bleak determinism was based on his own "corn pone" analysis and his absorption of the lessons of Darwinism and Herbert Spencer and the scientific revolution of the late nineteenth century.  It was also shaped by the personal adversities he endured that reinforced his pessimistic perceptions, including his financial hardships and the deaths of his younger brother Henry in 1858 and his daughter Susy in 1896 and his beloved wife Livy in 1904 and his daughter Jean on Christmas Eve in 1909. 

These events were cogent tragedies to him, and he naturally wrote with less whimsy or humor or enthusiastic vitality as he got older.  I intend to read Tom Quirk’s book, Mark Twain and Human Nature, published in 2007 by the University of Missouri Press, for broader perspective on this important aspect of Mark Twain’s points of view.

A quote by Robert Louis Stevenson is etched into a solid marble tablet in the form of an open book on the flanks of Mt. St. Helena, above California’s Napa Valley, in a spot where Stevenson lived while writing The Silverado Squatters in 1880.  The quote reads:

    “Doomed to know not Winter, only Spring,

      A being trod the flowery April blithely for a while,

      Took his fill of music, joy of thought and seeing,

        Came and stayed and went, nor ever ceased to smile.” 

“Doom” is, in a sense, the fate of each and every one of us;  some have more Aprils to live than others, and some have more to smile about;  and some have more of a disposition to smile.  Yay for being Chipper!  It is thought-provoking to consider that brain scientists have found that neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine play significant roles in our attitudes and dispositions and moods.  Studies of the structure and functioning of the brain in recent years, and of the influences of neurochemicals on our perceptions and moods, reveal that our ways of seeing the world are intricately and profoundly affected by chemical ‘messengers’ in our brains like oxytocin, dopamine, adrenalin, norepinephrine, and cortisol.  Curious and curiouser! 

Dorothy Parker, aghast at this new dimension in understanding, might query once again, “What fresh hell is this?!”  The extensive indignities inevitably involved with aging are almost always regarded as preferable to the finality of the alternative -- death!  These indignities can ironically be accepted with greater or lesser amounts of dignity, depending upon one’s grace, disposition and other factors.

Mark Twain fascination with determinism may turn out to be a reflection of more complex springs of action than the ones we usually recognize or acknowledge.  The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung once observed, “The more one sees of human fate and the more one examines its secret springs of action, the more one is impressed by the strength of unconscious motives and by the limitations of free choice.”  

In the Earth Manifesto treatise, Comprehensive Global Perspective – An Illuminating Worldview, valuable perspective on these issues of free will and the freedom of choice are contained in Chapter #52 - So Many Choices, and So Hard to Make the Right Ones!  Check it out!

Anyone, incidentally, who thinks that the people who are most fortunate in their lives are not distinctly 'lucky’, really has not thought much about the nature of the “cosmic lottery” of birth and inheritance, or of the random happenstances of circumstance, or of the unpredictable aspects and mechanisms of what we call fate.  Our appearance and health are significantly determined by what we inherit in our genes.  So, likewise, are such things as ill health or unsightly looks.  The fact that we are born to parents with wealth and privilege, or to ones that are poor and underprivileged, is to a significant extent a matter of good or bad luck. 

The ideologies of various political parties tend to coalesce around people who champion either the interests of the jealous rich or the interests of the envious masses.  I find it curious that conservatives tend to defend a maximum of freedoms for those who have money and privileges to maintain them, while liberals tend to demand measures that would ensure greater equality of opportunity and legal justice and social equity through progressive initiatives.  All in all, given the reality of the vicissitudes of fortune, the idea that we should structure our societies in somewhat fairer ways should appeal to everyone.

So That’s All, Folks!

As I reach this point in my discursive narrative, I note that the acclaimed actor Hal Holbrook, who has done a one-man show lecturing onstage as Mark Twain for more than 56 years, once made the observation that he has a natural affinity for some of Mark Twain’s sentiments, such as his cynical disapproval of racism and injustices and shallow principles and idiocies that are prevalent in our society.  I’d love to see Hal Holbrook perform, but as a poor substitute I watched the curious animated clay-model film titled The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.   In this film, Mark Twain is voiced by James Whitmore, and a jumping frog and Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher accompany Mark Twain on a hot-air balloon voyage.  James Whitmore provides a good interpretation of Mark Twain’s speaking style, and the film contains some of Mark Twain’s famous quotes.  It starts with the story about Halley’s Comet, so this brings my story full circle.

The orbit of Halley’s Comet follows a long elliptical path that takes it far out to a distance more than 30 times the distance of our home planet from the Sun.  Half an orbit later, Halley’s Comet streaks inside our own orbit to approach the Sun at a proximity closer than the planet Venus.  The comet has a small nucleus of ice and dust and gas which is less than ten miles in diameter, but when it gets relatively close to the Sun it warms up and a nebulous coma, or tail, can be seen extending 60 million miles across the sky.  This makes it an impressive display to us Earthlings.  To stretch a point, Mark Twain’s orbit within the circles of literary and popular imagination extends not only far and wide, but onward through history in influence and impact.  Yay for him!

l                       Truly,              

                          Dr. Tiffany B. Twain                        

                              April 21, 2011   (Germinating and evolving since 2008.)

Postscript

I wrote much of this “biography” just before Earth Day 2009, when it seemed apropos to embrace ideas that celebrate the marvelous and wonderful aspects of the Earth and the well-being of its ecosystems that support us.  It is also a perfect time now to salute Mark Twain on the one hundred and first anniversary of his death.  I sincerely hope that the influence of accurate understandings comes to inform our actions and public policies more powerfully in the coming years!

In Roughing It, Mark Twain tells the funny story of Dick Baker, an earnest gold miner of Dead-Horse Gulch.  He had a large grey cat by the name of Tom Quartz that was “the remarkablest cat” anyone ever did see.  He had “a power of dignity -- he wouldn’t a let the Gov’ner of Californy be familiar with him.  He never ketched a rat in his life -- ‘peared to be above it.”  Tom Quartz loved to superintend the miners in their placer-mining activities in the search for gold, but when the miners got into pick’n ‘n’ blast’n shafts along visible veins of quartz, that cat regarded it as the most “cussedest foolishness”.  He developed a powerful prejudice against the activity after having gotten blown up only once, and he became quite sagacious.  It proved to be impossible to cure him of his prejudice:  "Cure him!  No!  When Tom Quartz was sot once, he was always sot -- and you might a blowed him up as much as three million times 'n' you'd never a broken him of his cussed prejudice agin quartz mining."

An Afterward of Observation and Introspection

Within every adult there is the suppressed remnant of a curious, adventurous and enthusiastic child who is hidden deep in our individual psyches and souls.  It is to this child within, in part, that Mark Twain’s novels appeal.  Perhaps everyone secretly regrets that they have suppressed the child within, the child that wants to show off and gain glory like the people in Sunday school in the Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  Maybe everyone envies the smitten smart alecks in that sketch who skylark through the sermons!

In the first chapter of The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck had whittled a snake from a stick as a totem “like the Injuns do.”  When he showed it to Jim, Huck explained that the Indians carved animals on a totem pole for good luck.  Jim said, “Is dat a fac’?  Den how come dis totem got a snake on it?  A snake ain’t no animal.” 

Huck replies, “What is it then if it ain’t an animal?” 

Jim:  “Huck, you know more’n anyone ‘bout most ever’thin’, but even a nigger knows better’n to call a snake a animal.  Animals got fur an’ claws an’ such.”

 “Well all right then, what is it?” 

  “Why a insec’, Huck.  Ain’t nothin’ else for it to be, I reckon.”

Ideas and literature and words are wonderful.  One reason for reading Mark Twain is to gain a perspective on his good-natured, humorous, unpretentious perspective of life.  His creative way of exploring ideas is valuable, as was the case with his invention of traveling companions that he used in his travel writing to express vulgar observations and to give byplay with others in his stories.  I have always remembered Mr. Ballou, a character in Roughing It, who described the old horses on their journey across the desert as being “bituminous from long deprivation”. 

I salute the sesquipedalian!  Mr. Ballou’s “one striking peculiarity was his Partingtonian fashion of loving and using big words for their own sakes, and independent of any bearing they might have upon the thought he was purposing to convey.  He always let his ponderous syllables fall with an easy unconsciousness that left them wholly without offensiveness.  In truth his air was so natural and so simple that one was always catching himself accepting his stately sentences as meaning something, when they really meant nothing in the world.  If a word was long and grand and resonant, that was sufficient to win the old man's love, and he would drop that word into the most out-of-the-way place in a sentence or a subject, and be as pleased with it as if it were perfectly luminous with meaning.” 

Mr. Ballou complained mildly about the familiarities of their camp dog being allowed in their bed, saying that such a dog as that was not a proper animal to admit to bed with tired men, because he was “so meretricious in his movements and so organic in his emotions.”  Ha!

A Final Observation on Credulity and Humor

Mark Twain also wrote this in Roughing It:

“In Syria, once, at the head-waters of the Jordan, a camel took charge of my overcoat while the tents were being pitched, and examined it with a critical eye, all over, with as much interest as if he had an idea of getting one made like it;  and then, after he was done figuring on it as an article of apparel, he began to contemplate it as an article of diet.  He put his foot on it, and lifted one of the sleeves out with his teeth, and chewed and chewed at it, gradually taking it in, and all the while opening and closing his eyes in a kind of religious ecstasy, as if he had never tasted anything as good as an overcoat before, in his life.  Then he smacked his lips once or twice, and reached after the other sleeve.  Next he tried the velvet collar, and smiled a smile of such contentment that it was plain to see that he regarded that as the daintiest thing about an overcoat.  The tails went next, along with some percussion caps and cough candy, and some fig-paste from Constantinople.  And then my newspaper correspondence dropped out, and he took a chance in that -- manuscript letters written for the home papers.  But he was treading on
dangerous ground, now.  He began to come across solid wisdom in those documents that was rather weighty on his stomach;  and occasionally he would take a joke that would shake him up till it loosened his teeth;  it was getting to be perilous times with him, but he held his grip with good courage and hopefully, till at last he began to stumble on statements that not even a camel could swallow with impunity.  He began to gag and gasp, and his eyes to stand out, and his forelegs to spread, and in about a quarter of a minute he fell over as stiff as a carpenter's work-bench, and died a death of indescribable agony.  I went and pulled the manuscript out of his mouth, and found that the sensitive creature had choked to death on one of the mildest and gentlest statements of fact that I ever laid before a trusting public.”

Ha!  Ha!  One observer said that we should expect wisdom from writers, and that, while art may stop short of Biblical revelation, it ought to tell us more than we already knew.  Mark Twain's books do this.  They clarify the world.  In the film Mark Twain by Ken Burns, Russell Banks calls Mark Twain "a wise guy who was wise." 

Marvelous!  Thank you, Mr. Clemens for having enriched our world!