“I recall to your attention the extraordinary fact with which I began. To wit, that the human being, like the immortals, naturally places sexual intercourse far and away above all other joys—yet he has left it out of his heaven! The very thought of it excites him; opportunity sets him wild; in this state he will risk life, reputation, everything—even his queer heaven itself—to make good that opportunity and ride it to the overwhelming climax. From youth to middle age all men and all women prize copulation above all other pleasures combined, yet it is actually as I have said: it is not in their heaven; prayer takes its place.”—Mark Twain, “Letters From the Earth.”

23 replies on “Life, Reputation, Everything”

  4. Mark Twain was a great American, full stop. Maybe the greatest (I would nominate Louis Armstrong, but I’m open to argument). Saying these things today will get stones thrown at you in some places; saying them in 1939, when they were first published, or in the nineteenth century, when Twain thought them up, is quite remarkable.

  5. Thanks, Dan. I think I’ll start reading some Twain now. I think the last line, “… it is not in their heaven …”, depresses me the most.

  6. “prayer takes its place.”

    well I guess there are some pretty ecstatic forms of prayer out there: I was just praying, really hard loud sweaty praying, honestly.

  12. And yet Jesus is married to the church, and the church is married to him. There must be something going on behind those pearly gates, but I guess we won’t find out unless we weasel our way in to check out the action.

  13. @11, Clemens didn’t go to heaven. Nor did he want to. If he’s still around he’s got a cigar in his mouth and his ass in a rocking chair right now.

  14. Along the same line, philosopher Richard Mohr writes that sex and religion are in competition as modes of ecstatic experience:

    . . . it is not merely as a need that sexual pleasure is central to human life; in intensity and in kind it is unique among human pleasures; it has no passable substitute from other realms of life. For ordinary persons–not mystics or adolescent poets–orgasmic sex is the only access they have to ecstasy. … It is no accident therefore that religions have provided a fairly constant opposition to sex. The stiff and immediate competition that sex gives to religion as an end of life, paired with the fact that sexual arousal is not chiefly an act of will but something that comes over one, is too much for most religions to address adequately, especially Western ones that hold good will and good acts as paths to salvation and its ecstatic achievement.

    –Richard Mohr, Gays/Justice; A Study of Ethics, Society, and Law

  15. @4 – I live in one of those places, Porterville CA, location of the only City council in the whole State of California to take a stand in favor of Prop 8, and where Prop 8 did indeed pass with > 75% of the vote.

    I might just read this quote at an upcoming public meeting anyway

    Thanks for bringing it up Dan!

    To everyone else, please take a moment to write against the meddling in state-level Civil Rights matters by our local officials. The Council email addresses are at http://www.ci.porterville.ca.us/govt/cou…

    Also google “brian ward porterville” to find local blogs discussing the matter in more detail.

  17. @16, the speaker is an angel commenting on what man thinks heaven is like

    if i remember correctly, in this piece heaven is actually full of lots of lovely angelic sex with hours-long orgasms and the liek

  21. Twain gets more bitter, dark, and disturbing with age. For all those who liked Letters From the Earth, try the various pieces he did associated with Eve’s Diary and Adam’s Diary.

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