The Impossible Contradictions of Mark Twain
29 comments
·May 2, 2025gwern
I read this the other day and did a little more reading about his _Autobiography_ project, and Twain's early life was even harsher than I had realized: https://gwern.net/doc/psychiatry/bipolar/energy/2023-cavitch...
tbalsam
If you would like an original link non-heisted through the gwern domain, I'd encourage you to read it from the original UPenn link (University the professor who wrote this works at): https://web.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Cavitch_T...
FrankWilhoit
"They were innocent, he was damaged." But innocence is not contagious and damage is.
bsenftner
Twain's autobiography is amazing. By his own wishes, not published till 100 years after death; I got a copy pre-ordered on the date. His views on Christianity are spot on scathing captures describing their hypocritical behaviors today.
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e40
My grandmother was born in 1900 and every time I asked about her childhood she would say nothing and when pressed she would cry. Her parents died on consumption in the first decade of the new millennium. I think suffering was so much more common back then.
readthenotes1
My family has a tape recording made in the 1960s of an old country doctor.
Asked the most difficult period was, he answered without hesitation the Spanish Flu, not any of the mass grave yellow fever epidemics.
"I would see an old friend in town in the morning, be asked to go check on him in the afternoon, and find the whole family dead".
alabastervlog
The time before antibiotics and vaccines is alien to modern people. Basically everyone suffered trauma we'd call fairly extreme, these days.
The world also tended to be far more violent in the past than it is now.
The TV show Dickinson has fun with this, juxtaposing its modern-sounding and often flippant dialog with things like whole families you knew dying of disease being a pretty common piece of news to receive.
vik0
>The world also tended to be far more violent in the past than it is now.
Do you think people just dropped dead? Humans are not that fragile. The reason the average Roman age was relatively low is because of high mortality at childbirth. If you got to 20, chances were in your favor that you'd get to at least 60. This applies to non-roman, pre-vaccine societies too.
>Basically everyone suffered trauma we'd call fairly extreme, these days.
Eh, maybe. But at the same time, I don't agree that they would be "traumatized."
Heck, I bet if you could place a modern human who has lived his entire life in a developed Western country even a couple of thousand years back, I think he'd get pretty acquainted with that way of life in no time. If there's one thing we're good at it's probably adapting to our environment.
Life is a collection of habits. If you're used to death and destruction (though I am not saying that death and destruction were as common as you make it out to be), it won't phase you. Montaigne talks about this when comparing European society and moral norms to New World (Indian) societies and moral norms.
>The world also tended to be far more violent in the past than it is now.
No data proving this to be true, whatsoever.
Plus it's a vast overgeneralization. More violent where? In what today we would call France? China? Canada? Turkey? Chad? Argentina? Was there even a single event nearly as violent as World War 2 pre-vaccines, which happened 80 years ago? Your postulation is on very shaky legs, at best.
derektank
>Do you think people just dropped dead?
No, they intentionally killed each other.
If I recall correctly from the last time I read Stephen Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature the murder rate in pre-Industrialized Northern Europe is estimated to be between 50 and 500 per 100K which is anywhere from 10 to 100x as violent as the global rate today. And that's not including inter state or inter tribal warfare.
Spooky23
I think it’s impossible to live in the perspective of a person living in a place 300 years ago.
But I take the position that people are people, and tend to behave the same over time to similar stimuli.
My ancestors in 17th century Northern Ireland would be well acquainted with violence as Cromwell ravaged through and tried to cleanse them. I would imagine that familiarity would drive defensive behaviors - hoarding food, knowing when to run, being vigilant. That affects you.
If you’re a typical urban or suburban professional, you live a life free of strife or serious concern for bodily harm. That’s not the case for people who live a few miles from you, and certainly not the case for most people in the US even 100 years ago.
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actionfromafar
[flagged]
tomhow
Please don't post comments like this on Hacker News. In particular, the guidelines ask us to keep these principles in mind:
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43874504 and marked it offtopic.
actionfromafar
Thank you.
photochemsyn
[flagged]
tomhow
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
halayli
[flagged]
tomhow
We don't know why people vote the way they do, but in this case the comment breaks the guidelines, as does yours:
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
halayli
That is your opinion. If all you understood from my post was that I am commenting about voting, then you missed the point.
https://archive.ph/2025.04.28-161933/https://www.newyorker.c...