Almost Missed It...

Happy Birthday, Mark Twain, 174 years young today:

...a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him...

--Tom Sawyer Abroad

Begum of Bengal

Just ran across one of my favorite Mark Twain stories. He was responding to a toast at a dinner in his honor presented by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool:

Many & many a year ago I read an anecdote in Dana's book, "Two Years Before the Mast." A frivolous little self-important captain of a coasting-sloop in the dried-apple & kitchen-furniture trade was always hailing every vessel that came in sight, just to hear himself talk, & air his small grandeurs. One day a majestic Indiaman came plowing by, with course on course of canvas towering into the sky, her decks & yards swarming with sailors; with macaws & monkeys & all manner of strange & romantic creatures populating her rigging; & thereto her freightage of precious spices lading the breeze with gracious & mysterious odors of the Orient. Of course the littlecoaster-captain hopped into the shrouds & squeaked a hail: "Ship ahoy! what ship is that, & whence & whither?" In a deep & thunderous bass came the answer back, through a speaking-trumpet: "The Begum of Bengal, 123 days out from Canton—homeward bound! What ship is that?" The little captain's vanity was all crushed out of him, & most humbly he squeaked back: "Only the Mary Ann—14 hours out from Boston, bound for Kittery Point with—with nothing to speak of!"

Pretty sure I remember Hal Holbrook doing that one as part of his enduringly popular Twain shows back in the 60s.

In Which I Get One Up on Socrates

I remember noticing when I had outlived Keats (26) Shelley (29), Charlie Parker (34), Mozart (35), Byron (36), Pascal (39), Shakespeare (52)—even Thomas Chatterton (17).

Now I have outlived Socrates (70): I turn 71 today The computer programmers would remind me that I am now in my seventy-second year, having started at t=0. The mathematicians would say that t→n. I’m closing on Goethe (83), Sophocles (90) and Irving Berlin (101).

Socrates, readying himself to to drink the hemlock at 70, said it didn’t matter all that much because he was going to die soon anyway. I don’t share his cheerful insouciance, but I must say that so far I have had almost unspeakable good luck. I have dodged almost every important bullet on the health front (so far). I’ve got a nice wife who treats me with indulgence. I’m proud of my kids and delighted by my grandchildren. I’ve got interesting work to do, when I do it—indeed, I had better shut up now, lest I tempt fate.

I’m not at all disposed to give a final accounting just yet, but if pressed, I suppose I could draw up a trial balance. In the church of my childhood, we used to say: we have done the things we ought not to have done, and we have left undone the things we ought to have done. Guilty on all counts, your honor, at least in a general way. We Presbyterians didn’t fancy being too specific about our sins, and I’d just as well not make an allocution. I don’t think I have committed any major crimes in life, unless you count being one of those rich Americans (or unless you count being male).

I surely have committed any number of acts of unkindness or inconsideration, and when the blood sugar is down at three o’clock in the morning, I can actually make myself pretty blue over some Dumb Thing I did to somebody 30 years ago. I usually remind myself that it’s past caring now: the victim has probably long since closed the books on the matter, writing me off as a clown or a jerk. If I met them again and tried to apologize today, they’d probably try to run away (“Waiter! Check, please!”—or perhaps worse, “Security!”).

I suspect my main concern is that St. Peter, scrutinizing his clipboard, will say “I just don’t see anything very interesting in your resumé” Well, St. Peter can take his time—maybe it will look better later. Meanwhile I will abide by the insight of the guy in the Larry Block novel—the one who said that “any day above ground is a good day.” And, from the Oxford Book of Ages, a few comparisons for item #71:

A man who has settled his opinions does not love to have the tranquillity of his convictions disturbed; and at seventy-one it is time to be in earnest.

--Samuel Johnson,
A Journey to the Western Islands (1773)

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it happened or not, but I am getting old and soon I shall remember only the latter.

--Mark Twain (of course), letter to A.B. Paine

[I wonder what the neighbors thought of this next one:]

You think it horrible that Lust and Rage
Should dance attendance upon my old age.
They were not such a plague when I was young.
What else have I to spur me into song?

--W.B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley,December 1936

[And surely the best possible epigraph for 71:]

In July, when I bury my nose in a hazel bush, I feel fifteen years old again. It’s good! It smells of love!

--Corot, still feeling the compulsion
to go into the country and paint, 1867

--All the above from the Oxford Book of Ages
Chosen by Anthony and Sally Sampson (1985)