by Mark Twain
M. It is false! Oh, it was just like that godless miscreant to try to undermine an innocent child’s holy belief with his foolish lies; and if I could have my way, I—
B. But mama,—honest and true—is she still a virgin—a real virgin, you know?
M. Certainly she is; and has never been anything but a virgin —oh, the adorable One, the pure, the spotless, the undefiled!
B. Why, mama, Mr. Hollister says she can’t be. That’s what he says. He says she had five children after she had the One that was begotten by absent treatment and didn’t break anything and he thinks such a lot of child-bearing, spread over years and years and years, would ultimately wear a virgin’s virginity so thin that even Wall street would consider the stock too lavishly watered and you couldn’t place it there at any discount you could name, because the Board would say it was wildcat, and wouldn’t list it. That’s what he says. And besides—
M. Go to the nursery, instantly! Go!
CHAPTER 6
Mamma, is Christ God?
Yes, my child.
Mamma, how can He be Himself and Somebody Else at the same time?
He isn’t, my darling. It is like the Siamese twins—two persons, one born ahead of the other, but equal in authority, equal in power.
I understand it, now, mamma, and it is quite simple. One twin has sexual intercourse with his mother, and begets himself and his brother; and next he has sexual intercourse with his grand-mother and begets his mother. I should think it would be difficult, mamma, though interesting. Oh, ever so difficult. I should think that the Corespondent—
All things are possible with God, my child.
Yes, I suppose so. But not with any other Siamese twin, I suppose. You don’t think any ordinary Siamese twin could beget himself and his brother on his mother, do you, mamma, and then go on back while his hand is in and beget her, too, on his grandmother?
Certainly not, my child. None but God can do these wonderful and holy miracles.
And enjoy them. For of course He enjoys them, or He wouldn’t go foraging around among the family like that, would He, mamma?—injuring their reputations in the village and causing talk. Mr. Hollister says it was wonderful and awe-inspiring in those days, but wouldn’t work now. He says that if the Virgin lived in Chicago now, and got in the family way and explained to the newspaper fellows that God was the Corespondent, she couldn’t get two in ten of them to believe it. He says they are a hell of a lot!
My child!
Well, that is what he says, anyway.
Oh, I do wish you would keep away from that wicked, wicked man!
He doesn’t mean to be wicked, mamma, and he doesn’t blame God. No, he doesn’t blame Him; he says they all do it—gods do. It’s their habit, they’ve always been that way.
What way, dear?
Going around unvirgining the virgins. He says our God did not invent the idea—it was old and mouldy before He happened on it. Says He hasn’t invented anything, but got His Bible and His Flood and His morals and all His ideas from earlier gods, and they got them from still earlier gods. He says there never was a god yet that wasn’t born of a Virgin. Mr. Hollister says no virgin is safe where a god is. He says he wishes he was a god; he says he would make virgins so scarce that—
Peace, peace! Don’t run on so, my child. If you—
—and he advised me to lock my door nights, because—
Hush, hush, will you!
—because although I am only three and a half years old and quite safe from men—
Mary Ann, come and get this child! There, now, go along with you, and don’t come near me again until you can interest yourself in some subject of a lower grade and less awful than theology.
Bessie, (disappearing.) Mr. Hollister says there ain’t any.
ca. 1908-09
“The Turning Point of My Life”
I
If I understand the idea, the Bazar invites several of us to write upon the above text. It means the change in my life’s course which introduced what must be regarded by me as the most important condition of my career. But it also implies—without intention, perhaps—that that turning point was itself, individually, the creator of the new condition. This gives it too much distinction, too much prominence, too much credit. It is only the last link in a very long chain of turning points commissioned to produce the weighty result; it is not any more important than the humblest of its ten thousand predecessors. Each of the ten thousand did its appointed share, on its appointed date, in forwarding the scheme, and they were all necessary; to have left out any one of them would have defeated the scheme and brought about some other result. I know we have a fashion of saying “such and such an event was the turning point in my life,” but we shouldn’t say it. We should merely grant that its place as last link in the chain makes it the most conspicuous link; in real importance it has no advantage over any one of its predecessors.
Perhaps the most celebrated turning point recorded in history was the crossing of the Rubicon. Suetonius says:
Coming up with his troops on the banks of the Rubicon, he halted for a while, and, revolving in his mind the importance of the step he was on the point of taking, he turned to those about him and said, “We may still retreat; but if we pass this little bridge, nothing is left for us but to fight it out in arms.”
This was a stupendously important moment. And all the incidents, big and little, of Caesar’s previous life had been leading up to it, stage by stage, link by link. This was the last link—merely the last one, and no bigger than the others; but as we gaze back at it through the inflating mists of our imagination, it looks as big as the orbit of Neptune.
You, the reader, have a personal interest in that link, and so have I; so has the rest of the human race. It was one of the links in your life-chain, and it was one of the links in mine. We may wait, now, with bated breath, while Caesar reflects. Your fate and mine are involved in his decision.
While he was thus hesitating, the following incident occurred. A person remarkable for his noble mien and graceful aspect, appeared close at hand, sitting and playing upon a pipe. When not only the shepherds, but a number of soldiers also, flocked to listen to him, and some trumpeters among them, he snatched a trumpet from one of them, ran to the river with it, and sounding the advance with a piercing blast, crossed to the other side. Upon this, Caesar exclaimed, “Let us go whither the omens of the gods and the iniquity of our enemies call us. The die is cast.”
So he crossed—and changed the future of the whole human race, for all time. But that stranger was a link in Caesar’s life-chain, too; and a necessary one. We don’t know his name, we never hear of him again, he was very casual, he acts like an accident; but he was no accident, he was there by compulsion of his life-chain, to blow the electrifying blast that was to make up Caesar’s mind for him, and thence go piping down the aisles of history forever.
If the stranger hadn’t been there! But he was. And Caesar crossed. With such results! Such vast events—each a link in the human race’s life-chain; each event producing the next one, and that one the next one, and so on: the destruction of the republic; the founding of the empire; the breaking up of the empire; the rise of Christianity upon its ruins; the spread of the religion to other lands—and so on: link by link took its appointed place at its appointed time, the discovery of America being one of them; our Revolution another; the inflow of English and other immigrants another; their drift westward (my ancestors among them) another; the settlement of certain of them in Missouri—which resulted in me. For I was one of the unavoidable results of the crossing of the Rubicon. If the stranger, with his trumpet blast, had stayed away (which he couldn’t, for he was an appointed link), Caesar would not have crossed. What would have happened, in that case, we can never guess. We only know that the things that did happen would not have happened. They might have been replaced by equally prodigious things, of course, but their nature and results are beyond our guessing. But the matter that interests me perso
nally is, that I would not be here, now, but somewhere else; and probably black—there is no telling. Very well, I am glad he crossed. And very really and thankfully glad, too, though I never cared anything about it before.
II
To me, the most important feature of my life is its literary feature. I have been professionally literary something more than forty years. There have been many turning points in my life, but the one that was the last link in the chain appointed to conduct me to the literary guild is the most conspicuous link in that chain. Because it was the last one. It was not any more important than its predecessors. All the other links have an inconspicuous look, except the crossing of the Rubicon; but as factors in making me literary they are all of the one size, the crossing of the Rubicon included.
I know how I came to be literary, and I will tell the steps that led up to it and brought it about.
The crossing of the Rubicon was not the first one, it was hardly even a recent one; I should have to go back ages before Caesar’s day to find the first one. To save space I will go back only a couple of generations, and start with an incident of my boyhood. When I was twelve and a half years old, my father died. It was in the spring. The summer came, and brought with it an epidemic of measles. For a time, a child died almost every day. The village was paralysed with fright, distress, despair. Children that were not smitten with the disease were imprisoned in their homes to save them from the infection. In the homes there were no cheerful faces, there was no music, there was no singing but of solemn hymns, no voice but of prayer, no romping was allowed, no noise, no laughter, the family moved spectrally about on tiptoe, in a ghostly hush. I was a prisoner. My soul was steeped in this awful dreariness—and in fear. At some time or other every day and every night a sudden shiver shook me to the marrow, and I said to myself, “There, I’ve got it! and I shall die.” Life on these miserable terms was not worth living, and at last I made up my mind to get the disease and have it over, one way or the other. I escaped from the house and went to the house of a neighbor where a playmate of mine was very ill with the malady. When the chance offered I crept into his room and got into bed with him. I was discovered by his mother and sent back into captivity. But I had the disease; they could not take that from me. I came near to dying. The whole village was interested, and anxious, and sent for news of me every day; and not only once a day, but several times. Everybody believed I would die; but on the fourteenth day a change came for the worse and they were disappointed.
This was a turning point of my life. (Link number one.) For when I got well my mother closed my school career and apprenticed me to a printer. She was tired of trying to keep me out of mischief, and the adventure of the measles decided her to put me into more masterful hands than hers.
I became a printer, and began to add one link after another to the chain which was to lead me into the literary profession. A long road, but I could not know that; and as I did not know what its goal was, or even that it had one, I was indifferent. Also contented.
A young printer wanders around a good deal, seeking and finding work; and seeking again, when necessity commands. N. B. Necessity is a Circumstance; Circumstance is man’s master—and when Circumstance commands, he must obey; he may argue the matter—that is his privilege, just as it is the honorable privilege of a falling body to argue with the attraction of gravitation—but it won’t do any good, he must obey. I wandered for ten years, under the guidance and dictatorship of Circumstance, and finally arrived in a city of Iowa, where I worked several months. Among the books that interested me in those days was one about the Amazon. The traveler told an alluring tale of his long voyage up the great river from Para to the sources of the Madeira, through the heart of an enchanted land, a land wastefully rich in tropical wonders, a romantic land where all the birds and flowers and animals were of the museum varieties, and where the alligator and the crocodile and the monkey seemed as much at home as if they were in the Zoo. Also, he told an astonishing tale about coca, a vegetable product of miraculous powers; asserting that it was so nourishing and so strength-giving that the native of the mountains of the Madeira region would tramp up-hill and down all day on a pinch of powdered coca and require no other sustenance.
I was fired with a longing to ascend the Amazon. Also with a longing to open up a trade in coca with all the world. During months I dreamed that dream, and tried to contrive ways to get to Para and spring that splendid enterprise upon an unsuspecting planet. But all in vain. A person may plan as much as he wants to, but nothing of consequence is likely to come of it until the magician Circumstance steps in and takes the matter off his hands. At last Circumstance came to my help. It was in this way. Circumstance, to help or hurt another man, made him lose a fifty-dollar bill in the street; and to help or hurt me, made me find it. I advertised the find, and left for the Amazon the same day. This was another turning point, another link.
Could Circumstance have ordered another dweller in that town to go to the Amazon and open up a world-trade in coca on a fifty-dollar basis and been obeyed? No, I was the only one. There were other fools there—shoals and shoals of them—but they were not of my kind. I was the only one of my kind.
Circumstance is powerful, but it cannot work alone, it has to have a partner. Its partner is man’s temperament-his natural disposition. His temperament is not his invention, it is born in him, and he has no authority over it, neither is he responsible for its acts. He cannot change it, nothing can change it, nothing can modify it,—except temporarily. But it won’t stay modified. It is permanent; like the color of the man’s eyes and the shape of his ears. Blue eyes are gray, in certain unusual lights; but they resume their natural color when that stress is removed.
A Circumstance that will coerce one man, will have no effect upon a man of a different temperament. If Circumstance had thrown the bank note in Caesar’s way, his temperament would not have made him start for the Amazon. His temperament would have compelled him to do something with the money, but not that. It might have made him advertise the note—and wait. We can’t tell. Also, it might have made him go to New York and buy into the government; with results that would leave Tweed nothing to learn when it came his turn.
Very well, Circumstance furnished the capital, and my temperament told me what to do with it. Sometimes a temperament is an ass. When that is the case the owner of it is an ass, too, and is going to remain one. Training, experience, association, can temporarily so elevate him that people will think he is a mule, but they will be mistaken. Artificially he is a mule, for the time being, but at bottom he is an ass yet, and will remain one.
By temperament I was the kind of person that does things. Does them, and reflects afterwards. So I started for the Amazon, without reflecting, and without asking any questions. That was more than fifty years ago. In all that time my temperament has not changed, by even a shade. I have been punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing things first and reflecting afterward, but these tortures have been of no value to me; I still do the thing commanded by Circumstance and Temperament, and reflect afterward. Always violently. When I am reflecting, on those occasions, even deaf persons can hear me think.
I went by the way of Cincinnati, and down the Ohio and Mississippi. My idea was to take ship, at New Orleans, for Para. In New Orleans I inquired, and found there was no ship leaving for Para. Also, that there never had been one leaving for Para. I reflected. A policeman came and asked me what I was doing, and I told him. He made me move on; and said if he caught me reflecting in the public street again he would run me in.
After a few days I was out of money. Then Circumstance arrived, with another turning point of my life—a new link. On my way down, I had made the acquaintance of a pilot; I begged him to teach me the river, and he consented. I became a pilot.
By and by Circumstance came again—introducing the Civil War, this time, in order to push me ahead a stage or two toward the literary profession. The boats stopped running, my livelihood was gone.
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br /> Circumstance came to the rescue with a new turning point and a fresh link. My brother was appointed secretary to the new Territory of Nevada, and he invited me to go with him and help him in his office. I accepted.
In Nevada, Circumstance furnished me the silver fever and I went into the mines to make a fortune and enter the ministry. As I supposed; but that was not the idea. The idea was, to move me another step toward literature. For amusement I scribbled things for the Virginia City Enterprise. One isn’t a printer ten years without setting up acres of good and bad literature, and learning—unconsciously at first, consciously later—to discriminate between the two, within his mental limitations; and meantime he is unconsciously acquiring what is called a “style.” One of my efforts attracted attention, and the Enterprise sent for me, and put me on its staff.
And so I became a journalist—another link. By and by Circumstance and the Sacramento Union sent me to the Sandwich Islands for five or six months, to write up sugar. I did it; and threw in a good deal of extraneous matter that hadn’t anything to do with sugar. But it was this extraneous matter that helped me to another link.
It made me notorious, and San Francisco invited me to lecture. Which I did. And profitably. I had long had a desire to travel and see the world, and now the platform had furnished me the means. So I joined the “Quaker City Excursion.”
When I returned to America, Circumstance was waiting on the pier—with the last link: I was asked to write a book, and I did it, and called it The Innocents Abroad. Thus at last I became a member of the literary guild. That was forty-two years ago, and I have been a member ever since. Leaving the Rubicon incident away back where it belongs, I can say with truth that the reason I am in the literary profession is because I had the measles when I was twelve years old.