Comments on a Favorite Author

The presentation of Mark Twain's little story is concluded.  Grace wondered if I would have any remarks on it.

I am not a Twain scholar, but I have been reading and rereading in many cases most of his works since I was a lad.  I greatly admire and envy the man's facility with the English language.  I am taken with his humor and his ability to see and relate the funny side of life.  I recognize that he was shrewd and insightful and he often used his humor and his writing to skewer the foibles of humankind.  One of the best items I have ever read on people's understanding of wage/price economics is contained in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,

I have not read any part of the recently published (two of three parts) autobiography which Twain demanded not be published for 100 years after his death.  Each of the first two volumes runs to over 700 pages, and I understand the third volume to be released later this year runs to almost 800 pages.

I started my Mark Twain collection when I was fourteen years of age.  I bought a thirty volume "Authorized Uniform Edition" in a used bookstore and hauled it home in a cardboard box, riding on a city bus.  I still have the set, except for ACYIKAC which I loaned to someone and never got it back. But my sister, Vee, went searching on-line and a couple years ago she presented me with the volume which matches my set.  What a sister!

To "The Five Boons of Life."  The first four boons, fame, love, riches, pleasure are temporal and fleeting.  The writer tasted of each of them and knew well that they did not bring lasting satisfaction. That the fifth, death, would bring fulfillment was a projection the writer was ill-equipped to make for he seems to have rejected any concept of a loving God, hence "emptiness," or "nothingness," i.e., non-existence must be the boon he cherished.  How sad.  A man of such power, such intellect, one who brought much (temporal) pleasure to so many could find no lasting satisfaction in life.

Twain did suffer mightily, did lose much that was important to him.  Yet he seemed to have no bulwark against cynicism and bitterness.

The tale was written in 1902.  His beloved wife died in 1906 after a protracted illness, his darling daughter in 1910, and he himself that same year.

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.  --Jesus of Nazareth, in The Sermon on the Mount(Mt.6 KJV)

Word of the day: skewer

The Five Boons of Life V

CHAPTER FIVE

The fairy came, bringing again four of the gifts 

but Death was wanting.  She said:

"I gave it to a mother's pet, a little child.  It was

ignorant, but trusted me, asking me to choose for

it.  You did not ask me to choose."

"Oh, miserable me!  What is there left for me?"

"What not even you have deserved:  the wanton

insult of Old Age."

Word of the day: wanton

The Five Boons of Life IV

CHAPTER FOUR

"Choose yet again."  It was the fairy's voice.

Two gifts remain.  And do not despair.  In

the beginning there was but one that was precious,

and it is still here."

"Wealth--which is power!  How blind I was!"

said the man.  "Now, at last, life will be worth the

living.  I will spend, squander, dazzle.  These mock-

ers, and despisers will crawl in the dirt before me,

and I will feed my hungry heart with their envy.  I

will have all luxuries, all joys, all enchantments of

the spirit, all contentments of the body that man

holds dear.  I will buy, buy, buy! deference, respect,

esteem, worship--every pinchbeck grace of life the

market of a trivial world can furnish forth.  I have

lost much time, and chosen badly heretofore but let

that pass:  I was ignorant then, and could but take

for best what seemed so."

Three short years went by, and a day came when

the man sat shivering in a mean garret; and he was

gaunt and wan and hollow-eyed, and clothed in rags;

and he was gnawing a dry crust and mumbling:

"Curse all the world's gifts for mockeries and

gilded lies!  And miscalled, every one.  They are

not gifts, but merely lendings.  Pleasure, Love,

Fame, Riches; they are but temporary disguises for

 lasting realities--Pain, Greed, Shame, Poverty.  The

fairy said true; in all her store there was but one gift,

How poor and cheap and mean I know those others

now to be, compared with that inestimable one, that

dear and sweet and kindly one that steeps in dream-

less and enduring sleep the pains that persecute the

body, and the shames and griefs that eat the mind

and heart.  Bring it! I am weary, I would rest."

Word of the day: pinchbeck

The Five Boons of Life III

CHAPTER THREE

Word of the day: calumny

The Five Boons of Life II

CHAPTER TWO

The fairy appeared, and said:
"Four of the gifts remain.  Choose once more;
and oh, remember--time is flying, and only one of
them is precious."
The man considered long, then chose Love; and
did not mark the tears that rose in the fairy's eyes.
After many, many years the man sat by a coffin,
in an empty home.  And he communed with him-
self, saying:  "One by one they have gone away and
left me; and now she lies here, the dearest and the
last.  Desolation after desolation has swept over
me; for each hour of happiness the treacherous
trader, Love, has sold me I have paid a thousand
hours of grief.  Out of my heart of hearts I curse.
him."

Word of the day: desolation

The Five Boons of Life I

Presenting Mark Twain's Five Boons of Life.  The story will be posted one chapter per day, all five chapters.

CHAPTER ONE

In the morning of life came the good fairy with her
basket, and said:
"Here are gifts.  Take one, leave the others.
And be wary, choose wisely; oh, choose wisely! for
only one of them is valuable."
The gifts were five: Fame, Love, Riches, Pleasure,
Death.  The youth said eagerly:
"There is no need to consider," and he chose
Pleasure.
He went out into the world and sought out the
pleasures that youth delights in.  But each in its
turn was short-lived and disappointing, vain and
empty; and each, departing, mocked him.  In the
end he said: "These years have I wasted.  If I
could but choose again, I would choose wisely."

Word of the day: boon

Next the Loire Valley #T

June 12, 1429 the assault on the fortress at Jargeau by Joan of Arc was accomplished. Its many lulls and "treaties" notwithstanding the Hundred Years War in its ninety-third year.  The House of Plantagenet ruling England is occupying a major portion of France. The House of Valois, royal line of France, has for several decades been averse to pushing back to reclaim the country.  Comes a seventeen-year-old girl from a country village, sparks the should-be-king to action, raises an army and proceeds to undertake the task of ridding France of England's boot on its neck.

Joan of Arc has lifted the Seige of Orleans and is now in attack mode to drive the English from the Loire valley.  Jargeau is the first of four campaigns which ultimately ended the Hundred Years' War.  Joan, of course, did not live to see the final victory over the despised English, but she is nevertheless credited with having stirred France to action and making great strides toward freeing her beloved country.

I acquired my history largely from Mark Twain's Joan of Arc.  If he is short on any aspect of the story,  he is certainly long on interest.  The man could write.

See my earlier post about Joan here.

To Vet a Leader

Tomorrow is the 586th anniversary of the assault on the fortress at Jargeau by Joan of Arc.  Consider an earlier travail this seventeen-year-old leader endured in her pursuit of her Generalship.

"So we traveled to Poitiers, to endure three weeks of tedious delay while this poor child [Joan of Arc] was being daily questioned and badgered before a great bench of--what?  Military experts?--since what she had come to apply for was an army and the privilege of leading it to battle against the enemies of France.  Oh, no.  It was a great bench of priests and monks--profoundly learned and astute casuists--renowned professors of theology!  Instead  of setting a military commission to find out if this valorous little soldier could win victories, they set a company of holy hair-splitters and phrase-mongers to work to find out if the soldier was sound in her piety and had no doctrinal leaks.  The cats were devouring the house, but instead of examining the cat's teeth and claws, they only concerned themselves to find out if it was a holy cat.  If it was a pious cat, a moral cat, all right, never mind about the other capacities, they were of no consequence."

-- Mark Twain: Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by The Sieur Louis de Conte (Her Page and Secretary) Freely Translated out of the Ancient French into Modern English from the Original Unpublished Manuscript in the National Archives of France by Jean Francois Alden, vol. 1, p. 160

Global Disaster

Mark Twain was wise beyond the age in which he lived, and vain about it, too.  But it is truly amazing the insights he had; and his succinct writing is a perpetual model for logic of thought and clarity of expression.  Behold, how this passage written about 135 years ago is yet today a highly accurate picture of "scientific" projection as it exists in this twenty-first century!

-----And in umpteen thousand years the planet will no longer be capable of sustaining life.




Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, chapter 17.

Some day I might like to share Mr. Clemens's understanding of monetary policy and the economy.  He nailed it in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, but I fear we have ignored the message much too long.  Perhaps I'll forego the post.  Spitting into the wind.