Clemens quote on 70th birthday?
Jack
A couple weeks ago I heard a quote by Samuel Clemens about turning 70
years old. It was on Ken Burns' film about Mark Twain on PBS. The
quote was gone before I could write it down. It started with what
people think of you before you're 70, then goes on about how after 70
you're respected and don't have to behave yourself.
My Mom's turning 70 and I'd like to include the quote on her card. Can
anyone help me out with the real quotation?
Thanks,
Jack
John C. Shepard
http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_seventieth.html
Regrds, John C. Shepard
"Jack" <jack.f...@SPAMenmu.edu> wrote in message
news:3C696E12...@SPAMenmu.edu...
Jack
Thanks for the link. It has some interesting stuff, but not the quote I
was looking for.
- Jack
Frank Lynch
wrote:
>
>Thanks for the link. It has some interesting stuff, but not the quote I
>was looking for.
>
>- Jack
>
Seen this?
http://www.boondocksnet.com/twaintexts/biography/paine_bio236.html
Frank Lynch
The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page is at:
http://www.samueljohnson.com/
Daniel P. B. Smith
"John C. Shepard" <GI...@att.net> wrote:
> Try the following PBS link. Your quote might be in there somewhere.
>
> http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_seventieth.html
>
> Regrds, John C. Shepard
Another useful resource is the Project Gutenberg file
(see http://www.promo.net/pg ) mtent10.txt, which is currently 18
megabytes long and contains all the Twain material in Project Gutenberg.
It's not the complete works of Mark Twain, but it's an AWFUL lot.
But I can't find exactly what you're looking for. Here are two that
might be close.
<Begin quotation>
SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY
ADDRESS AT A DINNER GIVEN BY COLONEL GEORGE HARVEY AT
DELMONICO'S, DECEMBER 5, 1905, TO CELEBRATE THE SEVENTIETH
ANNIVERSARY OF MR. CLEMENS' BIRTH
Mr. Howells introduced Mr. Clemens:
"Now, ladies and gentlemen, and Colonel Harvey, I will try not
to be greedy on your behalf in wishing the health of our
honored and, in view of his great age, our revered guest. I
will not say, 'Oh King, live forever!' but 'Oh King, live as
long as you like!'" [Amid great applause and waving of napkins
all rise and drink to Mark Twain.]
Well, if I made that joke, it is the best one I ever made, and it is in
the prettiest language, too. --I never can get quite to that height. But
I appreciate that joke, and I shall remember it--and I shall use it when
occasion requires.
I have had a great many birthdays in my time. I remember the first one
very well, and I always think of it with indignation; everything was so
crude, unaesthetic, primeval. Nothing like this at all. No proper
appreciative preparation made; nothing really ready. Now, for a person
born with high and delicate instincts--why, even the cradle wasn't
whitewashed--nothing ready at all. I hadn't any hair, I hadn't any
teeth, I hadn't any clothes, I had to go to my first banquet just like
that. Well, everybody came swarming in. It was the merest little bit of
a village--hardly that, just a little hamlet, in the backwoods of
Missouri, where nothing ever happened, and the people were all
interested, and they all came; they looked me over to see if there was
anything fresh in my line. Why, nothing ever happened in that village--
I--why, I was the only thing that had really happened there for months
and months and months; and although I say it myself that shouldn't, I
came the nearest to being a real event that had happened in that village
in more than, two years. Well, those people came, they came with that
curiosity which is so provincial, with that frankness which also is so
provincial, and they examined me all around and gave their opinion.
Nobody asked them, and I shouldn't have minded if anybody had paid me a
compliment, but nobody did. Their opinions were all just green with
prejudice, and I feel those opinions to this day. Well, I stood that as
long as--well, you know I was born courteous, and I stood it to the
limit. I stood it an hour, and then the worm turned. I was the warm; it
was my turn to turn, and I turned. I knew very well the strength of my
position; I knew that I was the only spotlessly pure and innocent person
in that whole town, and I came out and said so: And they could not say a
word. It was so true: They blushed; they were embarrassed. Well, that
was the first after-dinner speech I ever made: I think it was after
dinner.
It's a long stretch between that first birthday speech and this one.
That was my cradle-song; and this is my swan-song, I suppose. I am used
to swan-songs; I have sung them several, times.
This is my seventieth birthday, and I wonder if you all rise to the size
of that proposition, realizing all the significance of that phrase,
seventieth birthday.
The seventieth birthday! It is the time of life when you arrive at a new
and awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which
have oppressed you for a generation and stand unafraid and unabashed upon
your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach--unrebuked. You can
tell the world how you got there. It is what they all do. You shall
never get tired of telling by what delicate arts and deep moralities you
climbed up to that great place. You will explain the process and dwell
on the particulars with senile rapture. I have been anxious to explain
my own system this long time, and now at last I have the right.
I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way: by sticking strictly
to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else. It sounds like an
exaggeration, but that is really the common rule for attaining to old
age. When we examine the programme of any of these garrulous old people
we always find that the habits which have preserved them would have
decayed us; that the way of life which enabled them to live upon the
property of their heirs so long, as Mr. Choate says, would have put us
out of commission ahead of time. I will offer here, as a sound maxim,
this: That we can't reach old age by another man's road.
I will now teach, offering my way of life to whomsoever desires to commit
suicide by the scheme which has enabled me to beat the doctor and the
hangman for seventy years. Some of the details may sound untrue, but
they are not. I am not here to deceive; I am here to teach.
We have no permanent habits until we are forty. Then they begin to
harden, presently they petrify, then business begins. Since forty I have
been regular about going to bed and getting up--and that is one of the
main things. I have made it a rule to go to bed when there wasn't
anybody left to sit up with; and I have made it a rule to get up when I
had to. This has resulted in an unswerving regularity of irregularity.
It has saved me sound, but it would injure another person.
In the matter of diet--which is another main thing--I have been
persistently strict in sticking to the things which didn't agree with me
until one or the other of us got the best of it. Until lately I got the
best of it myself. But last spring I stopped frolicking with mince-pie
after midnight; up to then I had always believed it wasn't loaded. For
thirty years I have taken coffee and bread at eight in the morning, and
no bite nor sup until seven-thirty in the evening. Eleven hours. That
is all right for me, and is wholesome, because I have never had a
headache in my life, but headachy people would not reach seventy
comfortably by that road, and they would be foolish to try it. And I
wish to urge upon you this--which I think is wisdom--that if you find you
can't make seventy by any but an uncomfortable road, don't you go. When
they take off the Pullman and retire you to the rancid smoker, put on
your things, count your checks, and get out at the first way station
where there's a cemetery.
I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time.
I have no other restriction as regards smoking. I do not know just when
I began to smoke, I only know that it was in my father's lifetime, and
that I was discreet. He passed from this life early in 1847, when I was
a shade past eleven; ever since then I have smoked publicly. As an
example to others, and--not that I care for moderation myself, it has
always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when
awake. It is a good rule. I mean, for me; but some of you know quite
well that it wouldn't answer for everybody that's trying to get to be
seventy.
I smoke in bed until I have to go to sleep; I wake up in the night,
sometimes once, sometimes twice; sometimes three times, and I never waste
any of these opportunities to smoke. This habit is so old and dear and
precious to me that I would feel as you, sir, would feel if you should
lose the only moral you've got--meaning the chairman--if you've got one:
I am making no charges: I will grant, here, that I have stopped smoking
now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on principle, it
was only to show off; it was to pulverize those critics who said I was a
slave to my habits and couldn't break my bonds.
To-day it is all of sixty years since I began to smoke the limit. I have
never bought cigars with life-belts around them. I early found that
those were too expensive for me: I have always bought cheap cigars--
reasonably cheap, at any rate. Sixty years ago they cost me four dollars
a barrel, but my taste has improved, latterly, and I pay seven, now. Six
or seven. Seven, I think. Yes; it's seven. But that includes the
barrel. I often have smoking-parties at my house; but the people that
come have always just taken the pledge. I wonder why that is?
As for drinking, I have no rule about that. When the others drink I
like to help; otherwise I remain dry, by habit and preference. This
dryness does not hurt me, but it could , easily hurt you, because you are
different. You let it alone.
Since I was seven years old I have seldom take, a dose of medicine, and
have still seldomer needed one. But up to seven I lived exclusively on
allopathic medicines. Not that I needed them, for I don't think I did;
it was for economy; my father took a drug-store for a debt, and it made
cod-liver oil cheaper than the other breakfast foods. We had nine
barrels of it, and it lasted me seven years. Then I was weaned. The
rest of the family had to get along with rhubarb and ipecac and such
things, because I was the pet. I was the first Standard Oil Trust.
I had it all. By the time the drugstore was exhausted my health was
established, and there has never been much the matter with me since.
But you know very well it would be foolish for the average child to start
for seventy on that basis. It happened to be just the thing for me,
but that was merely an accident; it couldn't happen again in a century.
I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never
intend to take any. Exercise is loathsome. And it cannot be any benefit
when you are tired; and I was always tired. But let another person try
my way, and see where he will come out. I desire now to repeat and
emphasise that maxim: We can't reach old age by another man's road. My
habits protect my life, but they would assassinate you.
I have lived a severely moral life. But it would be a mistake for other
people to try that, or for me to recommend it. Very few would succeed:
you have to have a perfectly colossal stock of morals; and you can't get
them on a margin; you have to have the whole thing, and put them in your
box. Morals are an acquirement--like music, like a foreign language,
like piety, poker, paralysis--no man is born with them. I wasn't myself,
I started poor. I hadn't a single moral. There is hardly a man in this
house that is poorer than I was then. Yes, I started like that--the
world before me, not a moral in the slot. Not even an insurance moral.
I can remember the first one I ever got. I can remember the landscape,
the weather, the--I can remember how everything looked. It was an old
moral, an old second-hand moral, all out of repair, and didn't fit,
anyway. But if you are careful with a thing like that, and keep it in a
dry place, and save it for processions, and Chautauquas, and World's
Fairs, and so on, and disinfect it now and then, and give it a fresh coat
of whitewash once in a while, you will be surprised to see how well she
will last and how long she will keep sweet, or at least inoffensive.
When I got that mouldy old moral, she had stopped growing, because she
hadn't any exercise; but I worked her hard, I worked her Sundays and all.
Under this cultivation she waxed in might and stature beyond belief, and
served me well and was my pride and joy for sixty-three years; then she
got to associating with insurance presidents, and lost flesh and
character, and was a sorrow to look at and no longer competent for
business. She was a great loss to me. Yet not all loss. I sold her--
ah, pathetic skeleton, as she was--I sold her to Leopold, the pirate King
of Belgium; he sold her to our Metropolitan Museum, and it was very glad
to get her, for without a rag on, she stands 57 feet long and 16 feet
high, and they think she's a brontosaur. Well, she looks it. They
believe it will take nineteen geological periods to breed her match.
Morals are of inestimable value, for every man is born crammed with sin
microbes, and the only thing that can extirpate these sin microbes is
morals. Now you take a sterilized Christian--I mean, you take the
sterilized Christian, for there's only one. Dear sir, I wish you
wouldn't look at me like that.
Threescore years and ten!
It is the Scriptural statute of limitations. After that, you owe no
active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a time-
expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: You have served your term,
well or less well, and you are mustered out. You are become an honorary
member of the republic, you are emancipated, compulsions are not for you,
nor any bugle-tail but "lights out." You pay the time-worn duty bills if
you choose, or decline if you prefer--and without prejudice--for they are
not legally collectable.
The previous-engagement plea, which in forty years has cost you so many
tinges, you cam lay aside forever; on this side of the grave you will
never need it again. If you shrink at thought of night, and winter, and
the late home-coming from the banquet and the lights and the laughter
through the deserted streets--a desolation which would not remind you
now, as for a generation it did, that your friends are sleeping, and you
must creep in a-tiptoe and not disturb them, but would only remind you
that you need not tiptoe, you can never disturb them more--if you shrink
at thought of these things, you need only reply, "Your invitation honors
me, and pleases me because you still keep me hi your remembrance, but I
am seventy; seventy, and would nestle in the chimney-corner, and smoke my
pipe, and read my book, and take my rest, wishing you well in all
affection; and that when you in your return shall arrive at pier No. 70
you may step aboard your waiting ship with a reconciled spirit, and lay
your course toward the sinking sun with a contented heart.
<end quotation>
OLD AGE
I think it likely that people who have not been here will be
interested to know what it is like. I arrived on the thirtieth of
November, fresh from carefree & frivolous 69, & was disappointed.
There is nothing novel about it, nothing striking, nothing to thrill
you & make your eye glitter & your tongue cry out, "Oh, it is
wonderful, perfectly wonderful!" Yes, it is disappointing. You
say, "Is this it?--this? after all this talk and fuss of a thousand
generations of travelers who have crossed this frontier & looked
about them & told what they saw & felt? Why, it looks just like
69."
And that is true. Also it is natural, for you have not come by the
fast express; you have been lagging & dragging across the world's
continents behind oxen; when that is your pace one country melts
into the next one so gradually that you are not able to notice the
change; 70 looks like 69; 69 looked like 68; 68 looked like 67--& so
on back & back to the beginning. If you climb to a summit & look
back--ah, then you see!
Down that far-reaching perspective you can make out each country &
climate that you crossed, all the way up from the hot equator to the
ice-summit where you are perched. You can make out where Infancy
verged into Boyhood; Boyhood into down-lipped Youth; Youth into
bearded, indefinite Young-Manhood; indefinite Young-Manhood into
definite Manhood; definite Manhood, with large, aggressive
ambitions, into sobered & heedful Husbandhood & Fatherhood; these
into troubled & foreboding Age, with graying hair; this into Old
Age, white-headed, the temple empty, the idols broken, the
worshipers in their graves, nothing left but You, a remnant, a
tradition, belated fag-end of a foolish dream, a dream that was so
ingeniously dreamed that it seemed real all the time; nothing left
but You, center of a snowy desolation, perched on the ice-summit,
gazing out over the stages of that long trek & asking Yourself,
"Would you do it again if you had the chance?"
>
>
> "Jack" <jack.f...@SPAMenmu.edu> wrote in message
> news:3C696E12...@SPAMenmu.edu...
> >
> > A couple weeks ago I heard a quote by Samuel Clemens about turning 70
> > years old. It was on Ken Burns' film about Mark Twain on PBS. The
> > quote was gone before I could write it down. It started with what
> > people think of you before you're 70, then goes on about how after 70
> > you're respected and don't have to behave yourself.
> >
> > My Mom's turning 70 and I'd like to include the quote on her card. Can
> > anyone help me out with the real quotation?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Jack
>
>
--
Daniel P. B. Smith
Email address: dpbs...@world.std.com
"Lifetime forwarding" address: dpbs...@alum.mit.edu
pereg...@gmail.com
"Before seventy we are merely respected, at best, and we have to behave all the time, or we lose that asset; but after seventy we are respected, esteemed, admired, revered, and don’t have to behave at all unless we want to."
Mark Twain
sjunk...@d94.org
--
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