Samuel Langhorne Clemens popularly known by his pen name Mark Twain reveals his rational optimism, in a letter birthday greeting letter to contemporary Walt Whitman.
Here is part of that letter (hat tip Matt Ridley, go to Letters of Note see the complete letter)
Transcript as follows: [bold emphasis mine]
You have lived just the seventy years which are greatest in the world's history & richest in benefit & advancement to its peoples. These seventy years have done much more to widen the interval between man & the other animals than was accomplished by any five centuries which preceded them.
What great births you have witnessed! The steam press, the steamship, the steel ship, the railroad, the perfected cotton-gin, the telegraph, the phonograph, the photograph, photo-gravure, the electrotype, the gaslight, the electric light, the sewing machine, & the amazing, infinitely varied & innumerable products of coal tar, those latest & strangest marvels of a marvelous age. And you have seen even greater births than these; for you have seen the application of anesthesia to surgery-practice, whereby the ancient dominion of pain, which began with the first created life, came to an end in this earth forever; you have seen the slave set free, you have seen the monarchy banished from France, & reduced in England to a machine which makes an imposing show of diligence & attention to business, but isn't connected with the works. Yes, you have indeed seen much — but tarry yet a while, for the greatest is yet to come. Wait thirty years, & then look out over the earth! You shall see marvels upon marvels added to these whose nativity you have witnessed; & conspicuous above them you shall see their formidable Result — Man at almost his full stature at last! — & still growing, visibly growing while you look.
Read the rest here
Well, Mark Twain was right. Such marvels has been brought about by capitalism.
2 comments:
Benson,
Wow. I loved Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn books and am a huge Walt Whitman fan, and to know of that correspondence between these giants moves me.
As a supplement, you might want to read Whitman's poem 'Years of the modern', which actually came before the 1889 letter.
Here's an excerpt:
Never was average man, his soul, more energetic, more like a God;
Lo! how he urges and urges, leaving the masses no rest;
His daring foot is on land and sea everywhere—he colonizes the Pacific, the archipelagoes;
With the steam-ship, the electric telegraph, the newspaper, the wholesale engines of war,
With these, and the world-spreading factories, he interlinks all geography, all lands;
—What whispers are these, O lands, running ahead of you, passing under the seas?
Are all nations communing? is there going to be but one heart to the globe?
Is humanity forming, en-masse?—for lo! tyrants tremble, crowns grow dim;
The earth, restive, confronts a new era, perhaps a general divine war;
No one knows what will happen next—such portents fill the days and nights;
Years prophetical! the space ahead as I walk, as I vainly try to pierce it, is full of phantoms;
Unborn deeds, things soon to be, project their shapes around me;
This incredible rush and heat—this strange extatic fever of dreams, O years!
Your dreams, O years, how they penetrate through me!(I know not whether I sleep or wake!)
The perform'd America and Europe grow dim, retiring in shadow behind me,
The unperform'd, more gigantic than ever, advance, advance upon me.
Thanks alot Paul,
My interpretation of 'Years to Modern' characterizes today's globalization.e.g
"With these, and the world-spreading factories, he inter- links all geography, all lands;" (and more....)
And it seems that both Mark Twain and Walt Whitman had been spot on!
Post a Comment