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“But, again, film is a hideously expensive way to tell anybody anything—and I include television and all that. What is more: Healthy people exposed to too many actors and too much scenery may wake up some morning to find their own imaginations dead.

“The only cure I know of is a library—and the ability to read.

“Reading exercises the imagination—tempts it to go from strength to strength.

“So much for that.

“It would surely be shapely on an occasion like this if something holy were said. Unfortunately, the speaker you have hired is a Unitarian. I know almost nothing about holy things.

“The language is holy to me, which again shows how little I know about holiness.

“Literature is holy to me, which again shows how little I know about holiness.

“Our freedom to say or write whatever we please in this country is holy to me. It is a rare privilege not only on this planet, but throughout the universe, I suspect. And it is not something somebody gave us. It is a thing we give to ourselves.

“Meditation is holy to me, for I believe that all the secrets of existence and nonexistence are somewhere in our heads—or in other people’s heads.

“And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.

“By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well.

“This to me is a miracle.

“The motto of this noble library is the motto of all meditators throughout all time: ’Quiet, please.’

“Thus ends my speech.

“I thank you for your attention.”

8

MARK TWAIN

I HAVE MEDITATED WITH Mark Twain’s mind. I began doing it when a child. I do it still. It encouraged me when I was young to believe that there was so much that was amusing and beautiful on this continent that I need not be awed by persons from anywhere else. I should model myself after other Americans. I now have mixed feelings about such advice. It hasn’t always been convenient or attractive to comport myself as the purely American person I am.

Since I am simultaneously a humorist and a serious novelist, I was asked to speak at the one hundredth anniversary of the completion of Mark Twain’s fanciful house in Hartford, Connecticut. The celebration took place on April 30, 1979. As a special honor to me, balls had been racked up on Mark Twain’s pool table on the third floor. I was to be allowed to break them with Mark Twain’s own cue. I declined. I did not dare give Mark Twain’s ghost the opportunity to tell me, by sending the cueball into a corner pocket without touching anything, say, what it thought of me.

My formal remarks on Twain were these:

“To every American writer this is a haunted house. My hair may turn white before this very short speech is done.

“I now quote a previous owner of this house: ’When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before—met him on the river.’

“I submit to you that this is a profoundly Christian statement, an echo of the Beatitudes. It is constructed, as many jokes are, incidentally, with a disarmingly pedestrian beginning and an unexpectedly provoking conclusion.

“I will repeat it, for we are surely here to repeat ourselves. Lovers do almost nothing but repeat themselves.

“’When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before—met him on the river.’

“Three words, in my opinion, make this a holy joke. They are ’warm’ and ’personal’ and ’river.’ The river, of course, is life—and not just to river pilots but even to desert people, to people who have never even seen water in that long and narrow form. Mark Twain is saying what Christ said in so many ways: that he could not help loving anyone in the midst of life.

“I am of course a skeptic about the divinity of Christ and a scorner of the notion that there is a God who cares how we are or what we do. I was