SATAN SUM, ET NIHIL HUMANUM A ME ALIENUM PUTO. Finished Mark Twain’s “Letters from the Earth,” on the recommendation of a (practicing) Jewish friend. It’s basically Twain’s complaint against God, framed as letters written by Satan to the other angels based on Satan’s observations of humankind.

Mostly, it got up my snout. If I had to summarize it in one word it would be “shrill.” Some of the passages on disease and Old Testament God-driven killings were powerful, but overall, the piece is mired in a worldview that smells so very, very late 19th-century: Biblical literalism and its mirror-image atheism, sexual obsession (OK, that’s us too, but Twain gets just creepily prurient here–plus his description of men vs. women on sex completely ignores the minor detail of pregnancy, which would be funny if it weren’t quite so telling), sweet naivete about the depths of human evil (how could anyone be bad enough for Hell?), and utter confusion about determinism and free will (Twain/Satan cutely blames all humans’ rottenness on our Creator, but our good deeds are our own, of course).

I wondered if I should be separating Twain more cleanly from his narrator, but some of Satan’s observations are more lurid versions of things Twain has said elsewhere in his own voice (e.g. Life on the Mississippi), and I couldn’t find reason to think that Twain was secretly satirizing the style of atheism the work promotes.

I was also interested to see how glancingly Twain touches on the Incarnation; the Crucifixion appears not at all. C’mon, man, at least Nietzsche took the bull by the horns!

LFTE does illustrate the common, swift progression from hatred of God, to hatred of religion, to corrosive contempt for one’s fellow man. So hey, that’s useful, I suppose.