MARK TWAIN

by William H. Benson

April 22, 1999

     Months before Mark Twain’s demise, a newspaper erroneously ran an article announcing that he had already died.  Invariably ready with a quick remark, he responded, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”  He then sent a humorous paragraph by telephone to the Associated Press denying the charge that he was dying and saying, “I would not do such a thing at my time of life.”  Even about the morbid, he kidded; his wit never ran to empty.

     But then at age 74, he was awakened on December 24, 1909 and was told that his deeply loved daughter, Jean, in the midst of an epileptic seizure, had passed away there in his home in Connecticut.  Her passing jolted him.  The final chapter of his autobiography was devoted to her.  “Has any one ever tried to put upon paper all the little happenings connected with a dear one–happenings of the twenty-four hours preceding the sudden and unexpected death of that dear one?  Would a book contain them?  Would two books contain them?  I think not.  They pour into the mind in a flood.”

     The passing away of loved ones–family and friends, figured prominently throughout Mark Twain’s life.  When he was four years old, his sister, Margaret, just five years older than he died.  Then, four years later, his older brother, Benjamin, died.  Then, three years later his father, the Judge John Marshall Clemens of Hannibal, Missour, died when Samuel Clemens was eleven years.  At age 22 he discovered that his younger brother, Henry, was aboard the steamship, the Pennsylvania, when she exploded.  Mark Twain that night watched Henry die.  Then, years later he buried first his daughter Susy, then his wife, Olivia, and finally Jean.

     Is is any wonder that his attitude late in life deteriorated into a pessimism, a depression, and a nihilism that left him bitter towards life and living?  A skeptic, uncommitted to any particular religious persuasion, he preferred to play the part of the outside critic; neither dogmatic in belief nor in unbelief, he lived uncommitted.  Throughout his life curiousity led to intrigue, and then to fascination, but never to a complete leap into commitment to any religious belief.  Eventually, his particular brand of skepticism bore its fruit, when he wrote, “Nothing exists; all is a dream.”

     And yet, during virtually all of his life he was such a dazzling personality–more attractive than even his literary art, which was the ultimate in American-syle, without a shred of European influence.  Heralded by princes and paupers alike, loved by millions all over the world, he relished the limelight, choosing to dress in a white suit, vest, and hat, while chomping furiously away on a series of cigars.  After-dinner speeches at banquets became his second career.  People just simply loved to hear him rant and swear and serve up that volcano of opinions on all subjects crossing the American cultural landscape.

     He gave us picturesque slices of life along the Mississippi River in a town called Hannibal, Missouri filled with people like Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Becky Thatcher, Sid, Aunt Polly, and In’jun Joe.  And the steamboat skidded gently along the river’s surface with Captain Bixby at the wheel and Mark Twain at his side, stopping ocassionally at ports like Hannibal.  Although he only lived there until he was seventeen, he brought the town to life for everybody.

     Yes.  He did become a bitter old man, flailing away at windmills created in his own mind, deeply hurt by the passing of his family members and close friends, but he gave us so much more: an irreverent attitude, a charming wit, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

     On April 21, 1910, four months to the day after Jean’s passing, Mark Twain, exhausted after a completely filled-up life, died.

TITANIC

by William H. Benson

April 8, 1999 

     The Titanic departed the harbor at Southampton, England on April 10, 1912, and five days later she lay on the ocean floor.  Of the 2340 passengers and crew, only 745, mostly women and children, survived to see New York City’s harbor, and so 1595 people perished.

     Speeding arrogantly along at 21 knots through an icefield, the Titanic struck an iceberg.  Those on board felt only a slight tremble and not a jolt and were so unconcerned that they chose to remain in their staterooms to dress for dinner.  But the much-praised water-tight compartments proved useless once the sea water began pouring through the torn metal fabric, and then, horrified as tragic realization dawned, the people understood that too-few life boats were available, only half as many as needed for the entire crew and passengers.

      Choices were quickly made.  Woman and children were first.  John Jacob Astor gallantly helped his ailing new bride into a lifeboat, lit a cigarette, and then proceeded to help other women into the lifeboats.  But tragically in a panic the men failed to fill the lifeboats to capacity, and many needlessly drowned.  John Jacob Astor went down with the ship, and so did the captain, most of the officers, and oddly a number of wives who chose to stay and to hold hands with their husbands.  Stoically, the band played on.

     Within hours the passenger vessel disappeared beneath the surface, not to be found until September 1, 1985.  Using new undersea robots equipped with television cameras, the oceanographer Robert D. Ballard explored the Titanic lying 12,000 feet deep south of the Newfoundland shoreline.

     Few, if any, absolutes exist in life.  The potential for great achievement into the beyond equals that for great sorrow and tragedy into the depths.  People live their lives trusting and hoping and thinking that “this will not ever happen to me”, “my neighbors will never treat me badly”, “my enemies will never force me out of my home”, “the engineers have made sufficient precautions”, and “a holocaust will never happen”.  Such hopeful thinking does not prepare a person for the moment when a madman, like Slobodan Milosevic, walks in and strikes hard.

      The Christians, Muslims, Croats, Serbs, and Albanians have lived side by side for centuries, and as long as a superior power, such as the former Soviet Union, ruled with a heavy hand, peace endured.  But with self-rule came Balkanization and the release of pent-up hatreds between the nationalities.  Prejudices rallied around the slogan of “ethnic cleansing”. Killing erupted.

     The ethnic Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo have lived in their villages as simple and poor folks, but hopeful.  Suddenly, without warning the Serbs have hounded and harrassed them and told them to get out.  The Serbs want Kosovo.  The unthinkable is happening.  Choices must be quickly made.  Stay and fight and be annihilated, or give up and run for shelter.  For the tens of thousands daily streaming with their wives and children and parents into neighboring Albania and Macedonia, the choice is easy.  Find a “lifeboat” and get to it quickly.

     What does the typical person do when informed that he or she has only a handful of hours to gather up belongings and prepare to escape?  “This boat is sinking!”  “The Serbs are coming to kill you!”  Tragedy has hit the innocent repeatedly during this twentieth century, and quick choices were made: stay with your husband/wife and hold hands, jump on the lifeboat, or run away.  Fortunately, this time the U. S. is not acting like the band aboard the Titanic, oblivious to what was happening– insisting on playing music and doing nothing to help. 

SIR ROGER BANNISTER 

     Although the Marathon has become the most popular running event during the past twenty years, for many years track enthusiasts considered the mile run the event that fascinated them most.  Today high school distance runners do not run the mile, but instead they run 1600 meters, which is approximately thirty yards more than the mile.

     But, the International Amateur Athletic Federation, the world body of track and field, recognizes today only records in metric distances, except for the mile.  It is still in the record books.  The mile, that part of the old British measurement system, still remains for track enthusiasts the last lone surviving vestige in the wholesale sellout to the metric system.  Please, do not remove the mile run.  It has too much history to be shoved aside.

     The mile requires the sprinting ability of a 400 meters runner plus a portion of the endurance necessary to complete a marathon.  Judgement of pace, knowing when to speed up and when to slow down and reserve strength, becomes crucial.  It often becomes a race of wits.  One competitor puis his intelligence and determination as well as his or her speed and stamina against another at all stages of the event.   

     Twenty-nine years ago this spring I was a high school sophmore running the mile and was not winning any ribbons and certainly not setting any records.  It was for me painfully difficult work, but still I read and dreamed of what a Wichita, Kansas high school/college student named Jim Ryan had done setting records in both the 880 yard run and the mile.  America felt proud.  Then there was his main competitor, Kipchoge Keino from Kenya, Africa, who beat him in the 1500 meters run at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.

     Eventually, I stumbled across the story of Roger Bannister.  In 1913 a guy named John Paul Jones set the first official mile record at 4:14.4, and throughout the next forty years exemplary runners like Glenn Cunningham and Gunder Haegg of Sweden steadily approached but never quite broke through the four minute mile.  In fact, Gunder Haegg set the record in 1945 at 4:01.4, and there it stayed for the next nine years until Roger Bannister broke it.  It had become a psychological barrier.

      To run a sub four minute mile means that a runner must run four laps around a track layed out to include 440 yards at an average of less than sixty seconds for each lap.  Roger Bannister’s plan was to concentrate on his quarter mile times.  On May 6, 1954 in windy conditions at a meet at Oxford, England, Bannister electrified the world when he broke the record with a time of 3:59.4, the first person below four minutes.  With the help of two teammates who set the pace, his quarter mile times were 57.5, 60.7, 62.3, and 58.9.

      Amazingly enough, six weeks later on June 21, 1954 John Landy of Australia broke Bannister’s mark with a time of 3:58.  Then, the following August the two met at the British Commonwealth Games, and there Bannister beat Landy.  But both had times under four minutes.  With the barrier cracked others, such as Peter Snell, Steve Ovett, and Sebastian Coe, lowered the record even further.  Today the record is held by Noureddine Morceli of Algeria with a time of 3:44.39, a full fifteen seconds off Bannister’s time.

      And whatever happened to Roger Bannister?  He retired from competitive racing in 1955 to concentrate on his medical studies, eventually receiving his M.D. degree at Oxford in 1963.  Then, in January of 1975 Queen Elizabeth II knighted him, and so he became a very surprised Sir Roger Bannister.  And the last I heard about the American hero, Jim Ryan, was that he was now the head librarian at one of the Kansas universities.  

STONEHENGE

by William H. Benson

March 25, 1999 

     Another spring is upon us, and with it baseball has arrived.  (Will it be another homerun slugfest this year?)  Green is showing up in the lawns, and the wheat fields already are a bright growing green.  The St. Patrick’s Day parades are behind us, and the Easter parades are just around the corner.  Farmers are working in their fields eager to plant the corn and other spring crops.  Warmer brighter days lighten the winter’s heaviness.  Seasons arrive, and then they leave; their cyclical imprint etched deep upon humankind’s consciousness.

     Last Saturday, the 20th, the vernal equinox arrived.  This is one of the two days each year when the days and nights are of equal length everywhere on the earth.  Last Saturday’s sunrise was at 5:57 a.m., and sunset was at 6:05 p.m., 12 hours and 8 minutes.  People on the North pole, the South pole, the equator, and all points in between had 12 hours of daylight and of night.

     Because the earth tilts 23° 27¢ relative to the plane of the earth’s orbit around the sun, the sun strikes the earth either directly on the equator or above or below it as the earth revolves around the sun.  On the vernal equinox the sun crosses the equator creating equal days and nights.

     Humankind has marked the seasons for millennium.  The attitude that “one day is as good as another” is fine until you want to begin planting the same day every year, and you need to know when that day is. 

     In southern England eighty miles west of London is Stonehenge, a monument of stones built by early Britons beginning as early as 3000 B.C and continuing until 1000 B.C.  Modern archaeologists discovered early on that the stone marker 80 yards east of the megaliths casts a shadow on the altar placed in the center of the stones at dawn on the summer solstice.

     Then, in 1963 the astronomer Gerald S. Hawkins deduced that the monument served as an accurate astronomical calendar.  He first assumed that all of these huge stones had to be placed according to some master plan.  He then discovered that the archways, vistas, heelstone, capstones, and pillars created sighting lines.  But to what?  Placement, he believed, was deliberate to stress viewing.  Bringing in a computer he identified that of the 12 unique sun/moon rise/set points (as of 1500 B.C.), 10 of them were marked by sightings along the stones properly aligned at Stonehenge.  Only two–midsummer moon sets at -29° and at -19°–were not marked.  The sighting lines focused upon the sun and the moon, not to the stars nor the planets.

     Why did ancient man devote so much energy and time to such a difficult project?

     Hawkins offered three answers:  Stonehenge served as a calendar.  It assured the priests of their power.  And, it provided a game for the thoughtful.     

     He wrote: “. . . many people of many different thoughts and cultures came to Stonehenge.  Different rulers, designers, priests, and workmen set their brains and hands to the vast work of alteration, adaptation, change, and creation.  The great monument grew from a simple circle open toward the midsummer sunrise to a rectangle-within-a-circle to a massive and complex cathedral of stones standing in arched circles and horseshoes.”

      Time is the valuable thing of life.  The tools we choose to mark it have varied over the aeons.  Thirty plus blocks of gray sandstone standing 13+ feet above the ground and each weighing 28 tons have been replaced today with daytimers, calendars, charts, tables, scientific instruments, and electronic gadgetry.  The elaborate apparatus tells us its now spring and time to play ball.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

by William H. Benson

March 11, 1999 

     On Thursday, March 11, 1302, Romeo married Juliet, according to the English playwright, William Shakespeare.  The newlyweds failed to celebrate even their first anniversary, for in the Prologue to the play, the chorus admits: “A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life.”

     Yale University’s authority on Shakespeare, Harold Bloom, wrote recently, “The permanent popularity, now of mythic intensity, of “Romeo and Juliet” is more than justified, since the play is the largest and most persuasive celebration of romantic love in Western literature.”

     Juliet, not yet fourteen years old, describes her feelings of love:

     “And yet I wish but for the thing I have.

      My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

      My love as deep: The more I give to thee

      The more I have, for both are infinite.”

     But because of the feuding of their families–the Montagues and the Capulets, the young lovers commit mutual suicide.  In the final scene as the Prince of Verona overlooks the carnage, he ends the play with these words:

      “Go hence to have more talk of these sad things;

        Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished;

        For never was a story of more woe

        Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

     Harold Bloom argues in is his recent book that Shakespeare invented the “human” in literature.  Before him, characters in literature age and die, but they do not change.  “In Shakespeare, characters develop rather than unfold, and they develop because they reconceive themselves.  Sometimes this comes about because they overhear themselves talking. . . . The more one reads and ponders the plays of Shakespeare, the more one realizes that the accurate stance toward them is one of awe.”

     In Elizabethean English he wrote, and his power to enthral and charm audiences/readers has transcended the four centuries since.  His characters, the wordplay, the audacious ideas, comedy, tragedy, history–he could do it all, the best ever.  His fellow collegue, Ben Johnson, wrote: “He was not of an age, but for all time!”

     The Academy Award nominations are out, and on Sunday evening, March 21st, Whoopi Goldberg will host the presentations of the Oscars.  The favorite to win Best Picture that night is the World War II film “Saving Private Ryan”; however, I suspect that the Italian-produced film “Life is Beautiful” may steal that award.

     For Best Original Screenplay critics are betting on “Shakespeare in Love”, last year’s romantic comedy.  The film is about the young playwright William Shakespeare who is struggling with writer’s block (a fallacious idea for someone who actually wrote like a machine).  It feels like “trying to pick a lock with a wet herring,” he says.  He meets an aristocratic English lady, falls passionately in love, and then in the afterglow sits down and writes “Romeo and Juliet”.            

     It seems that Hollywood has discovered and even likes Shakespeare.  “After 400 years of being merely the greatest of all writers, Shakespeare is suddenly an adorable guy and a pop icon.”

     Until Oscar night, “Beware the Ides of March.”  Julius Caesar failed to heed the warning.  Will we make the same mistake?

PERSIAN GULF WAR

by William H. Benson

February 25, 1999 

     Operation Desert Storm’s aerial campaign began in mid-January 1991 and was immediately a success.  Wave after wave of Allied bombers and missiles pounded Iraq’s capital, Baghdad, and other key targets during those first days of the Persian Gulf War.  The ground offensive then began on February 24, 1991, and one hundred hours later on the 27th, President Bush appeared on nationwide television to announce “Kuwait is liberated.  Iraq’s army is defeated.”

      But before leaving Kuwait, Iraqi troops deliberately set fire to Kuwait’s oil wells.  The smoke darkened the sky ugly.  And now eight years later the United Nations, still trying to bring Saddam Hussein to his knees, is caught somewhere between threats and actual bombing.

      Recently, I read General H. Norman Schwartzkopf’s autobiography, It Doesn’t Take a Hero.  He mentions that in addition to overseeing the military operation, he also had to play the role of a diplomat to the Saudi’s on whose sandy soil he and his forces stood.  At 10:00 pm. most evenings he wandered over to discuss certain matters with Prince Khalid.  He wrote, “To my consternation . . . what loomed largest for them was the cultural crisis triggered by the sudden flood of Americans into their kingdom. . . . The touchiest issues almost always involved religion.”

     For example, American women soldiers were seen working in T-shirts and were accused of disrobing in public;  Saudi women never show their arms.  Prince Khalid demanded that Schwartzkopf stop such brazen behavior.  Then, Christmas in 1990 presented a problem, but there was no way that even he, a General, could halt services from being held.  Christmas trees appeared, but Schwartkopf warned his staff that “even the very sight of a cross is very offensive to them. . . . We have to be sensitive to their desires.”

      A report of a wild party involving women dancing and alcohol being served was verified when CNN broadcasted a clip of it.  That evening a bewildered Schwartzkopf had to assure the distraught and excited Prince Khalid that he would investigate this matter and put a stop to it.

      James Michener in almost a kind of naive innocence once wrote, “I have been studying Islam for many years, and I cannot see any valid reason why this religion and Christianity cannot cooperate.” 

      The historian Will Durant had a different viewpoint.  “Nothing, save bread, is so precious to mankind as its religious beliefs; for man lives not by bread alone, but also by the faith that lets him hope.  Therefore, his deepest hatred greets those who challenge his sustenance or his creed.” 

     The rival religions and civilizations, Christianity and Islam, have clashed for centuries, beginning almost from their birth, continuing through the crusades, and into the modern era.  A third faith, Jewish, was then caught between the main combatants and cut by both swords.  The crusades of a millennium ago were in part the European Christians’ attempt to free Palestine, the Holy Land, from the Muslims.  After several centuries, the exhausted Europeans gave up, and a curtain dropped between the West and the East.

     The Persian Gulf War was another crusade and yet, different.  Although the liberation of Kuwait, rather than Palestine (Israel), was the primary objective, Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles were sometimes aimed at Israel.  Schwartkopf, the Christian, and Prince Khalid, the Muslim, hammered out agreements in which the Islamic culture was not polluted but remained pure.  Together, they learned to work together to fight and defeat a wildly aggressive Muslim brother, Saddam Hussein.  That curtain dividing East and West had opened but only for a brief moment.