We look around the world today and see everything from religious wars to President Smirky McStumbletongue's efforts to fabricate an excuse for a war with Iran - not to mention the more common litany of starvation and injustice. It's often hard to write about these events without slipping into either anger or dispair. In fact, it's hard not to. Fortunately there is one writer who dealt with many of the same issues and managed to lay open the ugliness of events (and people) with an acid wit that that avoided, for the most part, either of those fates.
Twain, best known for his Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer had a less known darker side in his later life. Letters from the Earth is my favourite Twain work. Written at the end of his life, Twain said Letters would never be published in his lifetime and he was right.
The book derives its title from a series of letters written by archangel Satan to the archangels Michael and Gabriel commenting on life on earth.
This is a strange place, and extraordinary place, and interesting. There is nothing resembling it at home. The people are all insane, the other animals are all insane, the earth is insane, Nature itself is insane. Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the "noblest work of God." This is the truth I am telling you. And this is not a new idea with him, he has talked it through all the ages, and believed it. Believed it, and found nobody among all his race to laugh at it.
My favourite part of the book is the short story The Damned Human Race. I was fortunate to have seen this read (performed?) on television by Hal Holbrook as part of his Evening with Mark Twain show some time around 1970.
He starts by standing convention on its ear.
I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the lower animals (so-called), and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that the theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.
And then holds the virtue of the higher animals...
In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which the other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally, a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.
...in contrast to the failings of us lower life forms.
Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh, not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.
Perhaps the saddest thing about this is the number of problems Twain wrote about that are still with us a hundred years later. But I do wish he could drop in for a visit because I would love to hear his shredding of our world.
Satan's letters can be read here.
This is the second time this post has been up. I originally posted it a few hours back but the formatting was messed up and I didin't have time to fix it so I took it down. You folks at prog bloggers may be able to see both versions. Apologies.