There is such a finality about death; however interesting it may be as
an experience, one cannot discuss it afterward with one's friends. I
have thought it a great pity that Mark Twain could not discuss, with
Howells say, or with Twichell, the sensations and the particulars of the
change, supposing there be a recognizable change, in that transition of
which we have speculated so much, with such slender returns. No one
ever debated the undiscovered country more than he. In his whimsical,
semi-serious fashion he had considered all the possibilities of the
future state--orthodox and otherwise--and had drawn picturesquely
original conclusions. He had sent Captain Stormfield in a dream to
report the aspects of the early Christian heaven. He had examined the
scientific aspects of the more subtle philosophies. He had considered
spiritualism, transmigration, the various esoteric doctrines, and in the
end he had logically made up his mind that death concludes all, while
with that less logical hunger which survives in every human heart he had
never ceased to expect an existence beyond the grave. His disbelief and
his pessimism were identical in their structure. They were of his mind;
never of his heart.
Once a woman said to him:
“Mr. Clemens, you are not a pessimist, you only think you are.” And she
might have added, with equal force and truth:
“You are not a disbeliever in immortality; you only think you are.”
Nothing could have conveyed more truly his attitude toward life and
death. His belief in God, the Creator, was absolute; but it was a God
far removed from the Creator of his early teaching. Every man builds his
God according to his own capacities. Mark Twain's God was of colossal
proportions--so vast, indeed, that the constellated stars were but
molecules in His veins--a God as big as space itself.
Mark Twain had many moods, and he did not always approve of his own God;
but when he altered his conception, it was likely to be in the direction
of enlargement--a further removal from the human conception, and the
problem of what we call our lives.
In 1906 he wrote:--[See also 1870, chap. lxxviii; 1899, chap. ccv; and
various talks, 1906-07, etc.]
Let us now consider the real God, the genuine God, the great God,
the sublime and supreme God, the authentic Creator of the real
universe, whose remotenesses are visited by comets only comets unto
which incredible distant Neptune is merely an out post, a Sandy Hook
to homeward-bound specters of the deeps of space that have not
glimpsed it before for generations--a universe not made with hands
and suited to an astronomical nursery, but spread abroad through the
illimitable reaches of space by the flat of the real God just
mentioned, by comparison with whom the gods whose myriads infest the
feeble imaginations of men are as a swarm of gnats scattered and
lost in the infinitudes of the empty sky.
At an earlier period-the date is not exactly fixable, but the stationery
used and the handwriting suggest the early eighties--he set down a few
concisely written pages of conclusions--conclusions from which he did
not deviate materially in after years. The document follows: