_ Now what interests me, as regards these details, is not the
details themselves, but the fact that none of them was foreseen
by me, none of them was planned by me, I was the author of none
of them. Circumstance, working in harness with my temperament,
created them all and compelled them all. I often offered help,
and with the best intentions, but it was rejected--as a rule,
uncourteously. I could never plan a thing and get it to come out
the way I planned it. It came out some other way--some way I had
not counted upon.
And so I do not admire the human being--as an intellectual
marvel--as much as I did when I was young, and got him out of
books, and did not know him personally. When I used to read that
such and such a general did a certain brilliant thing, I believed
it. Whereas it was not so. Circumstance did it by help of his
temperament. The circumstances would have failed of effect with
a general of another temperament: he might see the chance, but
lose the advantage by being by nature too slow or too quick or
too doubtful. Once General Grant was asked a question about a
matter which had been much debated by the public and the
newspapers; he answered the question without any hesitancy.
"General, who planned the the march through Georgia?" "The
enemy!" He added that the enemy usually makes your plans for
you. He meant that the enemy by neglect or through force of
circumstances leaves an opening for you, and you see your chance
and take advantage of it.
Circumstances do the planning for us all, no doubt, by help
of our temperaments. I see no great difference between a man and
a watch, except that the man is conscious and the watch isn't,
and the man TRIES to plan things and the watch doesn't. The
watch doesn't wind itself and doesn't regulate itself--these
things are done exteriorly. Outside influences, outside
circumstances, wind the MAN and regulate him. Left to himself,
he wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would
keep would not be valuable. Some rare men are wonderful watches,
with gold case, compensation balance, and all those things, and
some men are only simple and sweet and humble Waterburys. I am a
Waterbury. A Waterbury of that kind, some say.
A nation is only an individual multiplied. It makes plans
and Circumstances comes and upsets them--or enlarges them. Some
patriots throw the tea overboard; some other patriots destroy a
Bastille. The PLANS stop there; then Circumstance comes in,
quite unexpectedly, and turns these modest riots into a revolution.
And there was poor Columbus. He elaborated a deep plan to
find a new route to an old country. Circumstance revised his
plan for him, and he found a new WORLD. And HE gets the credit
of it to this day. He hadn't anything to do with it.
Necessarily the scene of the real turning-point of my life
(and of yours) was the Garden of Eden. It was there that the
first link was forged of the chain that was ultimately to lead to
the emptying of me into the literary guild. Adam's TEMPERAMENT
was the first command the Deity ever issued to a human being on
this planet. And it was the only command Adam would NEVER be
able to disobey. It said, "Be weak, be water, be characterless,
be cheaply persuadable." The latter command, to let the fruit
alone, was certain to be disobeyed. Not by Adam himself, but by
his TEMPERAMENT--which he did not create and had no authority
over. For the TEMPERAMENT is the man; the thing tricked out with
clothes and named Man is merely its Shadow, nothing more. The
law of the tiger's temperament is, Thou shalt kill; the law of
the sheep's temperament is Thou shalt not kill. To issue later
commands requiring the tiger to let the fat stranger alone, and
requiring the sheep to imbue its hands in the blood of the lion
is not worth while, for those commands CAN'T be obeyed. They
would invite to violations of the law of TEMPERAMENT, which is
supreme, and take precedence of all other authorities. I cannot
help feeling disappointed in Adam and Eve. That is, in their
temperaments. Not in THEM, poor helpless young creatures--
afflicted with temperaments made out of butter; which butter was
commanded to get into contact with fire and BE MELTED. What I
cannot help wishing is, that Adam had been postponed, and Martin
Luther and Joan of Arc put in their place--that splendid pair
equipped with temperaments not made of butter, but of asbestos.
By neither sugary persuasions nor by hell fire could Satan have
beguiled THEM to eat the apple. There would have been results!
Indeed, yes. The apple would be intact today; there would be no
human race; there would be no YOU; there would be no ME. And the
old, old creation-dawn scheme of ultimately launching me into the
literary guild would have been defeated.
__________
-THE END-
Mark Twain's essay: The Turning-Point of My Life _