The Twainian Vol 40 No 5 (1981) (Mark Twain Project)
“Troy, Saturday, Jan. 8. (1870)
Sweetheart, this is the anniversary of the battle of New Orleans, which was fought & bloodily won by Gen. Jackson, at a time when England & America were at peace.
It is also the anniversary of other events, but I do not know what they were, now.
I have been reading some new arguments to prove that the world is very old, & that the six days of creation were six immensely long periods. For instance, according to Genesis, the stars were made when the world was, yet this writer mentions the significent fact that there are stars within reach of our telescopes whose light requires 50,000 years to traverse the wastes of space & come to our earth. And so, if we made a tour through space ourselves, might we not, in some remote era of the future, meet & greet the first lagging rays of stars that started on their weary visit to us a million years ago? - rays that are outcast & homeless, now, their parent stars crumbled to nothingless & swept from the firmament five hundred thousand years after these journeying rays departed - stars whose peoples lived their little lives, & laughed & wept, hoped & feared, sinned & perished, bewildering ages since these vagrant twinklings went wandering through the solemn solitudes of space?
How insignificant we are, with our pigmy little world! - an atom glinting with uncounted myriads of other atom worlds in a broad shaft of light streaming from God's contenance - & yet prating complacently of our speck as the Great World, & regarding the other specks as pretty trifles made to steer our schooners by & inspire the reveries of “puppy” lovers. Did Christ live 33 years in each of the millions & millions of worlds that hold their majestic courses above our heads? Or was our small globe the favored one of all? Does one apple in a vast orchard think as much of itself as we do? or one leaf in the forest - or one grain of sand upon the sea shore? Do the pismires argue upon vexed questions of pismire theology - & do they climb a molehill & look abroad over the grand universe of an acre of ground & say “Great is God, who created all things for Us?”
I do not see how astronomers can help feeling exquisitely insignificant, for every new page of the Book of the Heavens they open reveals to them more and more that the world we are so proud of is to the universe of careening globes as is one mosquito to the winged & hoofed flocks & herds that darken the air & populate the plains & forests of all the earth. If you killed the mosquito would it be missed? Verily, What is Man, that he should be considered of God?
One of these astronomers has been taking photographs of tongues of flame 17,000 miles high that shoot aloft from the surface of the sun, & waver, & sink, & rise again - all in two or three minutes - & sometimes in one minute swinging a banner of flame from left to right a distance of 5,000 miles – an inconceivable velocity! Think of the hurricans that sweep the sun, to do such miracles as this! And other tongues of flame stream upward, bend & hang down again, forming a crimson arch 20,000 miles in height, through which our poor globe might be bowled as one bowls a football between a boy's legs.
But I must stop. I have concluded to stay here to-day & tomorrow, as this hotel suits me first rate. I had the sagacity to enter my non de plume on the register, & so they have made me very comfortable. (For I find that the landlord is a frantic admirer of mine.) He is a good fellow, too (naturally).
Go to bed, sweetheart. Go to bed, & sleep peacefully, & awake refreshed & happy, my darling. SAM"