“I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one”
-Mark Twain
It’s easy following a trend. Recognizing what soon will be one is harder. An opportunity too long pondered is lost; and then your just another schmo in baggy pants.
"It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart; the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you"
Mark Twain
An enemy will start a malicious rumor about your good charater; a friend will repeat it to your face.
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"At 50 a man can be an ass without being an optimist but not an optimist without being an ass."
When we are young and immortal, the world holds nothing but possibility. We see the world as what it can be.
By the time we're in our middle years, it seems prudent to look at the world as it really is.
Even so, every man grown into "mature" adulthood still harbors that brash young man, dreaming of how it will be when the world is at our feet.
Best to keep the young man under wraps. But keep him.
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"True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god"
-Mark Twain's Notebook
God is never found through disrespect, fear, or contempt. The strength of anyone's faith is only diminished by hating another for theirs.
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"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."
-Innocents Abroad
Often it is that the opinions we hold of ourselves and others get stale when we sit in one place for too long. Fear of the unknown is best conquered by striving to know what lies beyond our own narrow view of the world. Travel teaches tolerance to those willing to learn it.
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"Obscurity and a competence. That is the life that is best worth living."
- Mark Twain's Notebook
It is nothing that neccesarily draws fame. It is simply doing your best. Being a good friend, a good partner, a good citizen, and a good worker. To all those that know you thus you are remembered, and it is only to them that it matters.
And then you can live out your days secure and comfortable in the knowledge that you have lived a good life.
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"There is in life only one moment and in eternity only one. It is so brief that it is represented by the fleeting of a luminous mote through the thin ray of sunlight–and it is visible but a fraction of a second. The moments that preceded it have been lived, are forgotten and are without value; the moments that have not been lived have no existence and will have no value except in the moment that each shall be lived. While you are asleep you are dead; and whether you stay dead an hour or a billion years the time to you is the same." From Twain's notebook – 1896
An instant is a lifetime and to dwell on the past or fret for the future is to waddle in what does not exist. In the present is where to find the consequence of past moments and potential for future ones.
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"To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, 'Our country, right or wrong,' and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation."
Otherwise good men and nations wander from the straight and narrow. This is an inevitable reality. But blind acceptance of it – an unwillingness to do anything about it or to even recognize a problem – is to allow nations to lose their greatness and men to lose their soul.
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"The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not."
I guess nothing has changed much since Mark Twain offered this sage advice on staying healthy. Now, if you'll pardon me, I think I'll go have a bit of cheese while I make myself a martini before I go watch some television…
I don't want to overdo it.
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"We build a fire in a powder magazine, then double the fire department to put it out. We inflame wild beasts with the smell of blood, and then innocently wonder at the wave of brutal appetite that sweeps the land as a consequence."
The two "news anchors" sit on wooden lawn chairs, bracing against a cold wind sweeping across a wide expanse of green grass, somewhere on the campus of Virginia Tech.
No longer in their comfortable New York studio, the two are compelled by the previous day's events and an odd notion that sitting in wooden lawn chairs in Virginia will provide more gravitas to their delivery of the news.
Another violent and unexpected mass killing from an unhinged soul with a gun, an imagined wrong to right, and a lust for violence.
"How could it happen here? What does it mean? How do we make sense of it?"
The talking heads sitting in wooden lawn chairs really have nothing to offer, and their presence at the scene of a horrible tragedy on a now quiet college campus does nothing to add any insight to their rhetorical questions. They fill time, not saying much, looking mildly ridiculous in the chill wind.
And yet there they are, drawn to the spectacle of violence that seems to define a society even as the society wrings its hands asking why every time the spectacle continues.
Instead of wasting our time listening to talking heads following the trail of blood, we can look to Mark Twain, whose words, written for a speech in the autumn of 1907, provides an insight that is uncomfortable yet telling.
Never is such an act that occurred at Virginia Tech condoned or excused for any reason. And yet we must face a human trait that compels us to find solutions through violence, and justify it as a means to an end – when in fact it is just an end – of life, of innocence, of the souls of people and of nations.
The smell of blood pervades, we inflame the fire, and when the powder keg explodes, people rush, yet again, to wonder why.
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