Written on November 26, 1902.

Harper's Magazine.

_ 

Dear Sir,

You have read me between the lines. What I have tried to do, and what I still try to do, is to allow only a little to leak out between the lines. This has been a strain on me for thirty years. I have put this restraint upon me and kept it there all these years to keep from breaking my wife's heart, whose contentment I value above the salvation of the human race.

This is a confession that in building a wall across my Nile and damning my feelings and opinions behind it, and trying to caulk the leaks, I am not actuated by principle, but by something much stronger--sentiment.

I shall continue to leak, but shall not write the book unless I survive my wife--which I hope will not happen.

I believe that many a person has examined man with a microscope in every age of the world; has found that he did not even resemble the creature he pretended to be; has perceived that a civilization not proper matter for derision has always been and must always remain impossible to him--and has put away his microscope and kept his mouth shut.

Perhaps because the microscopist (besides having an influential wife) was built like the rest of the human race--ninety-nine parts of him being moral cowardice.

I am such a person myself. I used my microscope during fifteen years, and then put the result on paper five years ago. When ever I wish to account for any new outbreak of hypocrisy, stupidity, or crime n the part of the human race, I get out that manuscript and read it, and am consoled, perceiving that the outbreak was in obedience to the laws of man's make, and was not preventable.

My wife does not allow the manuscript to be published, and as ninety-nine parts of me forbid me to make myself comprehensively and uncompromisingly odious, it has been difficult to persuade me to restrict the reading of it myself!

But you shall read it when you come to see me; then perhaps you will believe with me that civilization  are not realities, but only dreams; dreams of the mind, not of the heart, and therefore fictitious, and perishable; that they have never affected the heart and therefore have no valuable progress; that the heart remains today what it always was, as intimacy with any existing savage tribe shall show. Indeed the average of the human 'brain' is not a shade higher today than it was in Egyptian times ten thousand years ago.

All this elaborate explanation of why I am not likely to write that book which you speak of amounts to this, when boiled down:`ninety-nine parts of me are afraid, and my wife, who is the bulk of the remaining fraction, forbids it.

Sincerely Yours,

S.L. Clemens

Riverdale, N. Y.

_

[Letter]

SITTING IN DARKNESS

From a November 26, 1902, letter by Mark Twain to Carl Thalbitzer, a Danish writer, who, after reading the short story "The Man That Corrupted Hadleburg." has asked Twain if he had plans to write about "The advantages and drawbacks of civilization."  

The story appeared in the December 1899 issue of Harper's Magazine. In 1906, two years after the death of his wife, Olivia Langdon, Twain published the manuscript mentioned: ` What is Man? 

The University of California Press's microfilm editions of the Mark Twain Papers, is quoted in Michael Sheldon's:`

Mark Twain, Man in White: `The Grand Adventure of His Final Years,' out in January from Random House.