LETTERS FROM THE EARTH Mark Twain

I read Mark Twain’s LETTERS FROM THE EARTH when I taught Honors American Literature. Far too controversial for the high school curriculum, I told interested readers about this work published posthumously, because Twain never expected it to be published.

I was amused by the sacred cows Twain satirized in this work. His defense of atheism, the testament to man’s frailties, controversial, although humorous, was censored for some time. The same students I taught the following year in World Literature who had read LETTERS FROM THE EARTH on their own recognized in our study of Voltaire’s CANDIDE a similar kind of irreverent humor. I could not, in a million years, have included Twain's text in my high school class syllabus.

Twain’s text begins with a a description of “the Creator . . . , the Presence  . . . , the Divine One,” a colossal figure, sitting on his throne in Heaven, “lifting His hand” magically creating suns, and thus light, a common theme in the book of Genesis.

The three archangels, Gabriel, Michael, and Satan engage in a dialogue about the Creator’s “Law of Nature . . . Law of God” and are stymied by the word animals. “What is [sic] animals? ” Satan inquires of Gabriel.

“Three centuries later, celestial time . . . 100 million years in earthly time,” a Messenger shows specimen of animals and the Creator explains that they are an experiment in “morals and conduct.”  Satan, the banished archangel, in eight letters to the archangels Michael and Gabriel, realizes that these animals devour each other, are killers and murderers as he realizes the theme of survival of the fittest.

Satan questions “The Law of God” as to the creation of Man. The Divine One describes the qualities of the nature of man as “courage, cowardice, ferocity, gentleness, fairness, justice, cunning, treachery, magnanimity, cruelty, malice, malignity, lust, mercy, pity, purity, selfishness, sweetness, honor, love, hate, baseness, nobility, loyalty, falsity, veracity, untruthfulness.”  

Satan’s letters include ridiculing Man who would never sing in public invent a Heaven, “where everybody sings and plays a harp,” and the foolishness of their beliefs such an amazing Heaven with no sex, when they risk losing Heaven because of their desire to have sex at all costs. He says that man created modesty where “European ladies cover their ankles and expose their breasts.” Noah, he claims, saved flies but left countless humans to die. He blames the Father for allowing Man to wage war, and in the same breath, create the Beatitudes.

“Papers of the Adam Family” contains “An Extract from Methuselah’s Diary,” a discourse between Adam and Eve, and other blatant jibes at prophets, professors, and politicians.

The chapter, titled “Letters to the Earth,” is a tongue in cheek letter delivered to a coal dealer in Buffalo, New York, from “the Office of the Recording Angel, Department of Petitions.” The Angel lists the coal dealer’s selfish and ridiculous petitions to the Divine One, affirming the dealer’s “good deeds” such as donating $15 to a needy widow with three children when his profit for the month was $45,000.

In “The Damned Human Race,” among Twain’s topics are his poking fun at scientists and geologists’ revelations on the history of man, the intelligence of God, man’s persecutions of heretics, religions, women, savages, the sport of hunting animals, and proposes that Darwin’s “Ascent of Man”  should be titled “Descent of Man.”

Religious commentary is not the only subject of this text, although it is perhaps the most humorous. One of the funniest subjects is Twain’s "Manual on Manners," at a funeral, at a fire, such as the appropriate order in which to rescue people from a burning building [mother-in-laws last], and the rules for visiting cards [obviously a long gone tradition of etiquette]. Chapters on Spelling, “A Tramp Abroad: the French and the Comanches,” and James Fenimore Cooper’s prose style, compose a number of other chapters.

Twain, a well traveled writer presents a hilarious, irreverent, pessimistic view of man that attests to his satirical talent. His witty introspections will entertain you and make you laugh out loud.

THE GIFT OF FEAR

"This book can save your life." Gavin De Becker

"[It] should be read by everyone who wants to triumph over fear."  Scott Gordon, Chairman of the Domestic Violence Council

I read this book after listening to an interview Mr. De Becker gave on the TODAY sand OPRA WINFREY shows. " Every story in the book is true. Men in all parts of the world are more violent than women. For this reason, the language in the book is gender-specific to men," notes De Becker.

His first example, and an incident he refers to many times in this book involves a woman named Kelly, who moves up the stairs to her apartment. She discovers that her door is unlocked: "the neighbors don't get it, she thinks. But carrying two bags of groceries, she is thankful she doesn't have to fish her keys out of her purse. She locks the door after she returns to her car to retrieve more groceries. As she approaches the fourth floor, one of her grocery bags breaks open, and cans roll down the stairs. 

A man approaches her; his arms are filled with cans. He told her he was going to the fourth floor as well. Her immediate reaction was apprehension, but he seemed so nice and helpful. He noticed cat food in one of the bags. He told her that if she had a hungry cat in her apartment, he would offer to carry the cat food in her apartment after she unlocked the door. She thanked him and hoped he would leave.  He promised her he would leave, but he didn't.

Kelly suffered a rape during a three hour attack. She admits that she found out later how he stabbed another woman to death. Kelly was twenty-seven years old at the time of the attack. She was a counselor for disturbed children and was unable to go back to work. When she met with De Becker, she told him that intuition had saved her life. When he went to the kitchen to have a drink, she escaped. She remembered how he had closed the window. She realized he had done that to keep the noise from other people.  Because Kelly had courage and followed her intuition, she survived.

De Becker notes that "more people were killed in the Viet Nam war than Americans who died from gunshot wounds. . . .Americans murder rate is ten times worse than that of other Western countries . . . . Nineteen children died in the Oklahoma bombing, but seventy children died that same week at the hands of a parent . . . four million children were abused in the year before, not an unusual occurrence."

De Becker relates how he counsels people who are concerned about their safety or have suffered violence by others. He asks them if they had any intuition or noticed subtle warnings.

He discusses the violence he and his mother suffered at the hands of his stepfathers and how his mother tried to commit suicide. He says, "his ghosts had become his teachers."

Gavin De Becker designed the MOSAIC assessment system designed to screen threats to Supreme Court justices. He trained hundreds of New York police detectives how to assess domestic violence. He trained those in government agencies, including the CIA. His other clients are prosecutors, corporations, movie stars, athletes, recording artists, college students and many more.

Fear and intuition help people because of their survival instincts. They sometimes unconsciously understand signals that are threats. De Becker tells clients to "listen to yourself . . . predict the danger you are in by noticing clues such as understanding that perpetrators may look like ordinary persons, such as Ted Kraczynski who became a brutal serial killer. Neighbors thought that he was normal and reporters thought so, too.

De Becker devotes an entire section of a chapter to charm and niceness.  Children are lured by strangers who offer them gifts, adults ignore the signals of strangers who approach them and men who tell them that you are too snobbish to talk to them, so you talk to them to prove that you are friendly.

Different categories of perpetrators are outlined so people can recognize the signs This 400 page best seller, trains readers to use common sense and feelings of fear to survive violent attacks.  Recognized as the leading expert on violent behavior, he trains how to protect themselves..

Read this book, buy it for family member, and suggest it to friends and acquaintances.  The information in this text may save their lives.

MEMORIES OF LOREAUVILLE, LA

MEMORIES OF MY HOME TOWN, LOREAUVILLE, LA 

Few people I have met over the years have had the privilege of growing up in a village as wonderful and nurturing as Loreauville. During my forty year career as an educator in three states and twelve schools, I introduced myself to my new students on that first day of class by relating some of the following vignettes of my years growing up in Loreauville.
They were spellbound by my heartfelt stories about
• amazing teachers, nuns and priests who guided our social and religious development
• the anomaly of being served delectable cafeteria food
• being taught to drive by my paternal grandfather who propped me up on a huge road grader
• convincing the principal to let me drop a physical education class so I could take an additional academic class
• wading in knee deep water on Main street after a torrential rain
• being enveloped in insecticide as we chased those “mosquito-spraying” trucks
• eating organic food [fresh vegetables, fresh milk, and all manner of meat and fish] dad obtained bartering with customers
• plucking kumquats and mandarin oranges from a friend's yard
• playing marbles and handling snakes
• collecting flattened pennies from the railroad track
• shopping for school clothes at my grandfather's General Merchandise Store,
• keeping track of the summer reading books I checked out from the public library
• being taught to dance by our household help
• riding horses
• skiing at Lake Dauterieve
• jitterbugging
• driving my granddad's black Bat mobile recklessly around town with my friends as they recited Hail Marys in the back seat
• wearing couture dresses fashioned by my artistic, talented grandmother to prom
• sitting on the porch swing at my best friend's house, pretending we were famous actresses
• checking the cash register at my dad's business to figure out how much his other daughters were extracting from the till
• being mentored in flute and piccolo by the principal's son
• wearing hats and gloves to Sunday mass
• drinking cokes with our family at a neighborhood bar after mass
• eating lunch at Masso’s
• sitting on bar stools watching Mr. C cook hamburgers
• watching Mrs. C painstakingly repair rosaries
• dancing to the jukebox
• speeding away from our only policeman  as he tried to hunt me down for any manner of traffic violations
• riding the bus to school so I could socialize with friends
• dating my first love
• laughing at Robbie’s jokes as we commuted to USL for summer sessions
• watching my great uncle repair horseshoes in his metal shop
•  enjoying the scented smoke from uncle's cigars
• tasting a slice of ham from my grandfather's meat deli
•  being awakened by the scent of gardenias wafting up to my bedroom window
• hanging freshly-laundered clothes on  clotheslines in the back yard
• singing “Lullaby and Good Night” to my baby brother  as I rocked him to sleep
• watching my youngest sister chomp on  newly-purchased tube of lipstick
• drinking fresh rain water from grandmother's cistern
• acting as an angel in the May religious observance of the Holy Mother
• serving as a Hail Mary rosary bead on the football field as our pastor recited the rosary
• sitting on my godmother's porch poring over beautiful clothing from Spiegel’s
• listening to my Catholic mother remind me that Jesus or the Kennedys might visit so I would clean the house extra well
•  listening to our talented neighbor play a rousing ragtime rendition on her piano
• participating in a minstrel at the church hall
• being scared stiff by grandmother as she navigated Main Street by driving on the sidewalk to buy fabric at a local store
• listening to a town character talk about  myriad  subjects and watching him drive away on his brightly festooned bike
• spending the night at a classmates' house at a nearby lake
• cramming for tests in the First Aid room near the stage during recess and lunch
• being anesthetized by the smell of the oil-mopped floors at our high school
• tasting succulent sugar cane stalks plucked from a cane field
• picking pecans in the fall
• being assaulted by flit can spray during mosquito season
• and my most-treasured memory, being nestled in a cocoon of safety, warmth, support, and encouragement by my village family and friends


My students were instantly mesmerized as I recalled memories of my growing up years, and thanked God that this was going to be an easy class, not so. I taught a World Religions Gifted Honors class: holy books and epics on a worldwide scale--Old and New Testament studies, Sumerian and Egyptian literature, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, Persian-Arabic, and Chinese-Japanese studies.


My challenge was to engage and excite these students to reach beyond their comfort zones, to obtain an understanding of the importance of religion and history on a global scale, and to inspire them to love learning. And so, I told them specifically how my small town education had inspired and motivated me to life-long learning.


I recollected for them how my educational life was framed by my nurturing and sometimes excitingly eccentric teachers:


• Mrs. Gonsoulin, who in first grade, taught memorization with her piano playing sing- alongs and read memorable stories.


• the spinster Boutte sisters: dark-haired, stout Antoinette, who taught students to memorize and recite history passages,


• and her gray-haired sister Camille, who began every class with a dose of powdered B.C. powder poured into a coke bottle. One day we noticed she skipped the medication and promptly snipped off, with scissors, a peeking slip strap that refused to stay inside her dress. She was a solemn woman who loved us and taught us to love reading.


• Mrs. Segura, a perpetual dieter, ate boiled eggs every day, and to this day, I loathe the smell of eggs. A fantastic teacher, she taught learning strategies, organizational skills, and self-esteem through her lessons on the importance of note-taking, organizing notebooks, and individual student presentations. I still have the family history project she assigned.


• Mr. Dressel, affectionately labeled Mr. D, taught me that good teaching involved knowing students’ learning styles. I developed a subdued interest in science, and I studied relentlessly, so I could make A’s in biology and chemistry, because I knew those classes were important. My forte was always English classes. And to this day, I realize how much content I remember from his classes, and how his unique teaching ability to create camaraderie among students helped us to work together as a class and helped me to realize the importance of knowing my students.


• Mrs. Gerhardt appeared later in my high school career. As Mom Wick would have noted, “She is an Ah-mer-ee-kan [sic], ” meaning that she was not a resident of Loreauville, an outsider. But what an amazingly mature climate she created in our English classroom! I had always loved reading, but she was able to inspire me to appreciate the nuances of literature that most students would not be able to discern. I realized later how she created an atmosphere of mutual respect between student and teacher.


• Mrs. Lalonde, my Home Economics teacher, taught us civility, femininity, style, modesty, moderation and sewing, and cooking in her Home Economics classes. I made a lined wool suit as my senior project. When I first married I sewed all my clothes, my children’s clothing, and created all the window treatments for our many homes. Today Home Economics teachers are seldom part of the curriculum in large schools. What a treasure she was! She administered essay tests on home economics content [writing], showed us how to follow recipes [math], taught us how substitute ingredients [science], how to hide figure flaws [remember her postage stamp girdle? I always envied her tiny frame], taught us how to set a formal table, encouraged us to enter sewing and cooking competitions, and to use fresh ingredients in recipes. I still use my Home Economics book to this day. She asked me to study for district Rally competition at USL. I escaped to Mom Wick’s house, locked myself in her guest bedroom for an entire month one summer, and studied for months, pouring over lecture notes, books, and demonstration notes. I won first place at USL, then first place at State completion, and was awarded the Betty Crocker Homemaker Award my senior year. Mrs. Lalonde taught Home Economics 1-4 in a four-room white cottage attached to the school by a walkway.


• Mr. Lissard was a phenomenal math teacher. As a particularly right-brained learner, I struggled in math classes and had to work particularly hard to rise to the challenge. He gave good explanations to those of us who may not have caught on immediately to a math concept. He taught me that not all students learn the same way. It was the first exceptional challenge I had in my entire high school career. And, he drew football plays on the board; football players in his classes must have served as a particular challenge to him since he was head Coach for many years. I had the privilege of learning football concepts as well. Today educators use the term multi-dimensional learning to describe a class such as this.


• Mrs. Olive Shaw,our British Literature teacher, loved Shakespeare. I remember reading Macbeth, unedited and unadapted, in our senior year. Many years later when I taught British Literature to my students, I told them how I struggled with Shakespeare’s language in high school but came to appreciate the mastery of his language later in life as I poured over all 37 plays during my teaching career. I showed them my high school English textbook, and they wanted to know why there were no pictures. Mrs. Shaw had us recite lines, broke the play down into segments [today called chunking], and assigned lines that we had to explain in front of the class. She expected us all to read the play and come to class prepared. Some students, thinking she would not notice, read the comic book or Cliff Notes versions of Macbeth. From her class, I learned to inspire students to challenges and to eviscerate a student verbally in a nicely-worded manner.


• Ms. Breaux, the LHS librarian, was an enormously powerful force in the Loreauville community. As the public school librarian and community activist, she knew all of us, or parents, our friends, and our acquaintances, much more than we expected anyone to know about us. She was omnipresent—we couldn’t escape her. She attended meetings, church events, hunted us down in classes, followed our extra curricular school activities and served as a prototype of the Renaissance man. Encouraging us to read and learn was her forte. She brought the outside world into our lives by suggesting reading titles and scheduling slide show presentations at the church hall from her world travels. I marveled at her ability to use media other than books and pictures at a time when media presentations were not the norm. She kept us on task when we used resources in the school library and prevented any sort of shenanigans students had in mind. She taught me about classifying books by explaining the Dewey Decimal System. I had three majors in college: English, French, and Media, at a time in the sixties before the arrival of the Information age. She encouraged, motivated, and cajoled me to learn beyond my greatest expectations. I often wondered how she maintained such a vigorous, healthy lifestyle and an amazing physique. She was at the forefront in our town in terms of meditation, travel, gardening, reading, and learning. I marveled at her quest for knowledge. She wanted to master everything she learned. I recall her asking my grandmother, an expert seamstress, to help her learn to sew. She took canning classes at the school cafeteria and showed us how to pray to specific saints for important causes. She was not subtle; she did not mince words, and although her strong personality may have offended some people, I loved her the way a child loves a mentor. All of my teachers inspired me, but she is the reason I chose teaching as my lifelong profession.

MAN'S SEARCH FOR MEANING - VICTOR FRANKEL

Psychiatrist Victor Frankle endured many years of horrific conditions while he was imprisoned in Nazi death camps in 1945, in Theresienstat, then Aushchwitz, because he was a Jew.  His mother, father, and brother were killed in these camps. Because of his immense suffering, Frankel developed a form of psychotherapy known as logotherapy. His premise is that the force behind man’s motivation is his search for meaning.

Frankel notes that injustices to man are made tolerable by man’s ability to draw on thoughts and memories of family and persons who they had meaningful relationships with, by religion, dark humor, and nature. He mentions one woman who is fated to die and how she stares at a blossoming branch of a tree and speaks of its ability to make her realize that she is alive at that moment. She had to find a reason to cope with her circumstance.

 Being shuttled into train cars, 1500 traveling with meager possessions for several days the prisoners were mortified when they arrived at Auschwitz. Robbed of their possessions and packed into small places, they were fed a small piece of bread every four days. Prisoners were chosen randomly to be sent to the crematoriums. Those who survived forced every plausible method to hang on to sanity: stories, poems, songs, and dark humor .

Frankel quotes writers who discuss the concept of suffering:  Dostoevsky, “not to be worthy of my suffering”, Spinoza, in ETHICS, “Emotion ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear, precise picture of it,” Tolstoy, Nietzsche “that which does not kill me makes me stronger,“ Doris Lessing, and Schopenhauer who wrote about “freedom from suffering.” He says that man who has suffered need not fear anything more than his God.

Devoting  an entire chapter to logotherapy, Frankel discusses how logotherapy helps people to reverse their attitudes about their weaknesses or adverse psychological conditions. A stuttering boy found himself using his stuttering to elicit sympathy  by showing he was just a stuttering boy, and by this experience was able to stop stuttering. I have related the complicated concept of logotherapy in a very concise manner. To do justice would take a more extensive explanation and synthesis.

Frankel ends the text with this quote “Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of, and since Hiroshima, we know what is at stake.” Men can and should do what is in their power.  

He comes to the conclusion that everyone needs a strong goal in life to overcome the worst circumstance. Man needs to have an unconditional faith in the search for meaning in life. 

[A Catholic priest recommended this text. Even though Frankel discusses in a narrative format his experiences in death camps, this is not an easy read.]

FALL OF GIANTS Ken Follett

Ken Follett's 2004 PILLARS OF THE EARTH, at 976 pages, follows the lives of master builders during the construction of a Gothic cathedral during the Twelfth century.


Another of his medieval epics, WORLD WITHOUT END, over 1,000 pages, takes place over seven centuries ago, and follows the a family of builders through their personal lives as they deal with the plague, the abuses of the church, and how bad people smelled before the invention of deodorant.


FALL OF GIANTS, 985 pages, is the first book in his projected trilogy of the Twentieth Century. The time span of this novel, from 1911 to 1924, portrays the fall of the Giants, the crowned heads of Europe, and the fates of five families from Wales, Germany, England, Russia, and America. A cast of characters, six pages long, is presented at the front of the book.


The major battles of World War I and the Russian Revolution provide a backdrop for Follett to tell the story of eight fictional families, rich and poor, living through these historical times. Oppression of the classes, suffragettes in London organizing to promote the vote for women, and liberal thinking as opposed to the conventional thinking of the old generation serve as themes. In this history lesson Follett weaves actual political events, real historical characters such as Presidents, statesmen, kings, queens, princes, politicians, and members of Parliament in a readable but very, very long story ---lots of drama, lots of history, and lots of words.

I studied history and civics many, many years ago, so my grasp of the political events, especially the wars, is tenuous. I remembered why the assassination of the Archduke was relevant, but I did not remember the terrible implications it had for the political arena in England, Germany, Russia, and America.


Sip a cup of tea, a slap of vodka, a shot of jaegermeister, or a martini to get you started on this door stopper of a book. It will be a long, long read.

YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN

Thomas Wolfe wrote YOU CANT GO HOME AGAIN as a fictional work.  Stories emerged after the novel was published that his editor had done much of the writing. It does not matter because this book, written about America’s loss of prosperity, especially during the stock market crash, explores the themes of loss, of 

regret, and of failure, and of innocence lost.

George Webber, the protagonist says, “You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the 

time — back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

I recently thought about this novel published posthumously as I remembered my experience with leaving home. As we age, we often feel a desire to go return to our childhood fantasies, to growing up feeling secure and appreciated, and to the small town environment where everyone knew you.

I took home memories when I left at twenty-one years old. 


I also took the experiences of growing up in a huge Catholic family, riding the bus to school, even though I lived just a few blocks away, pedaling my bike at night from my dad’s business to my uncle’s general merchandise store, walking on the blacktopped streets, huddling in the high school while hurricanes threatened to flood our town, eating Sunday dinners with my family and boyfriend, watching movies at the local drive in theater, playing flute and piccolo in band, going out with friends, smelling the scent of sugar cane being processed at the mill, and learning to cook under the supervision of my grandmother.

When I visit home, I still see the one stop-light town I grew up in. I remember vividly the small, family owned grocery stores, the gas stations, dry cleaners, pharmacy, Catholic Church, and especially the farming community that provided a lucrative livelihood for amazing men who knew the science of the earth and gained respect in our small town. 


Most of my best friends are gone to live in big cities. Some have stayed, but the busyness of our lives inhibits visiting.

I go home now to see my eighty-seven year old mother.  I know she won't be here much longer.We sit on the front porch swing and watch cars go by on Main Street, talk about her past, and comment on how the landscape has changed. 

I remind her about the time she wrote a society column for a local newspaper, delegated chores to her children so she could take coffee breaks, kept the books at my dad’s garage, put the radio on while we ate breakfast so we could listen to fairy tales, and master-minded community clubs and organizations with a vengeance. I called her the godmother of the Cajun mafia. Do it her way or not at all.

Her only brother was given the opportunity to attend college because, in the forties, most women married and stayed home to raise families. She has verbal abilities and artistic talent that was seldom recognized. She gave me a journal of her early 1940's high school years. I found over 100 journals hidden in plastic boxes all over the house. I kept some of her drawings, mostly profiles of beautiful women she must have seen in movies. Those are the memories I cherish.

Thomas Grey, a British poet, wrote an elegy about his hometown, the small village of Stoke Poges, in the United Kingdom. In ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD, he laments the fact that the villagers may have had great ambitions, intelligence, and amazing talent, but their lives were stifled because of lost opportunities, their inability to become educated or escape their lot. He says,

"Full many a gem of purest ray serene


The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:


Full many a flower is born to blush unseen

And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

My mother was a "flower to blush unseen." She had amazing 

potential. Had she been given  the chance for intellectual 

stimulation, training, or schooling, as Gray says, she "might have 

waked to ecstasy of the living lyre." 

Those of us who have left with memories of home take with us 


vignettes of our lives. We can’t go home again, but we can treasure 


what we left.