“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
-Mark Twain
To all there comes but once chance at each day, and then the opportunity to live it to its fullest is gone. For most, regret is of lost opportunities, not mistaken actions. Seize the day!
“We are nothing but echoes. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own, we are but a compost heap made up of the decayed heredities, moral and physical.”
-Mark Twain
We may believe that we’ve whistled a new tune or scratched out a new phrase more beautiful or clever than anyone thought to do before. We are but fooling ourselves and have only to thank all who have gone before us, throughout the long eons of time, for such foolishness.
“It was no accident that planted Lincoln on a Kentucky farm, half way between the lakes and the Gulf. The association there had substance in it. Lincoln belonged just where he was put. If the Union was to be saved, it had to be a man of such an origin that should save it. No wintry New England Brahmin could have done it, or any torrid cotton planter, regarding the distant Yankee as a species of obnoxious foreigner.
It needed a man of the border, where civil war meant the grapple of brother and brother and disunion a raw and gaping wound. It needed one who knew slavery not from books only, but as a living thing, knew the good that was mixed with its evil, and knew the evil not merely as it affected the negroes, but in its hardly less baneful influence upon the poor whites. It needed one who knew how human all the parties to the quarrel were, how much alike they were at bottom, who saw them all reflected in himself, and felt their dissensions like the tearing apart of his own soul.
When the war came Georgia sent an army in gray and Massachusetts an army in blue, but Kentucky raised armies for both sides. And this man, sprung from Southern poor whites, born on a Kentucky farm and transplanted to an Illinois village, this man, in whose heart knowledge and charity had left no room for malice, was marked by Providence as the one to “bind up the Nation’s wounds.”
-Mark Twain, New York Times, January 13, 1907
“The xmas holidays have this high value: that they remind Forgetters of the Forgotten, & repair damaged relationships.”
– Mark Twain, from a letter to Carlotte Welles, December 30, 1907
Christmas, the holiday season, is, at its best, a time of remembering who and what is important. A time of healing.
Merry Christmas to the forgetters, the forgotten, and all who believe in our power to heal all the ills, hatreds, and misfortunes that at times plague us all.
Image Credit: TwainQuotes.com
“He is now fast rising from affluence to poverty.”
-Mark Twain
Unmatched is the speed with which all illusions of growing affluence disappear into oblivion.
Don’t look. It won’t make you any richer.
“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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