It was on this day in 1865 that the young Mark Twain’s The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County was published in the New York Saturday Press. In two years it would be the title contribution to his first book. And with that the world would never be the same.
Jan and I have made Mark Twain pilgrimages twice in our lives. The first time was pushing on twenty-five years ago when we lived in Wisconsin, and I served a suburban Milwaukee congregation. During the summer hiatus in our regular services, we took US 90 to La Crosse, and then turned south onto the Great River Road, which traces along the length of the Mississippi. We followed it as far as we had time, which turned out to be to Cairo, about the southern most part of Illinois. However, our main reason for the trip was to stop about two thirds of the way down the river at Hannibal, Samuel Clemens’ boyhood home.
It was resoundingly disappointing. All these years later what I recall most there is the statue of Huck and Tom that stands at the foot of Cardiff Hill. It shows the two boys walking along. We were told it represents Huck trying to slow Tom’s progression forward toward adulthood. I found that a past strange perspective, considering, well, everything about Samuel Clemens and what he thought and what he wrote about. In fact I have to admit the whole experience struck me as being slightly off. As Clemens didn’t really have a lot of good things to say about the town in his lifetime, it occurred to me that maybe it’s only reasonable that down the years the good citizens of Hannibal came to be mostly about smiling at the tourists and taking their money.
The more interesting pilgrimage location for me was the Mark Twain house and museum in Hartford, which Jan, auntie, and I finally got to see a couple of years before auntie died and Jan and I returned to California. Clemens lived there between 1874 and 1891, and wrote many of his most famous books there, including both the Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Unlike with our visit to Hannibal, with its air of naked tourist attraction not particularly mitigated by anything else, this was a horse of another color. Walking through the house, and standing in his study, looking down at the same grounds, more or less that he would have viewed over and over again, and then looking at his writing desk where his imagination roiled into some of the great tales to be spun from our American culture that I felt some electric charge, which seemed to me a connection between the man who was the great writer, his insights into the human condition, all of them, and, well, anyone willing to be open to the experience. And I was. I was.
There is so much one could address about him. What I want to reflect on here is Samuel Clemens’ spirituality. To start here is a little bouquet of Mark Twain observations about religion and its practitioners, starting with perhaps his most widely quoted, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” Or, how about his observation about the Bible? He tells us it “has noble poetry in it… and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards a thousand lies.” Finally, as to practitioners of my trade he rather dryly noted, “I’ve never heard a sermon in which I could not find some good, though there have been some near misses.”
In some ways this followed his general view of humanity. Here are two examples, again, first the most widely quoted. “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.” And, a personal favorite, “A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.”
Somehow I have a feeling he would have a few words to say about today’s events.
Wish he were around…
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