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Moments with Mark Twain

Chapter 142: Her Chief Desire
By Mark Twain
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American LiteratureEssays, Letters & SpeechesHumour

About This Book

This collection gathers curated excerpts from the author's wide-ranging output—short sketches, travel memoirs, novels, essays, and late reflections—arranged chronologically to show development of tone and technique. Selections include humorous sketches, travel-journal anecdotes, satirical social commentary, scenes from well-known fictional narratives, and essays examining religion, society, and personal beliefs. The foreword and brief contextual headings guide readers through thematic transitions and highlight recurring themes of irony, social observation, skepticism, and human foibles. The volume functions as an accessible sampler intended to represent the author's evolution and the diversity of his subjects and styles.

FROM “EVE’S DIARY” (1905)

Her Chief Desire

It is my prayer, it is my longing, that we may pass from this life together—a longing which shall never perish from the earth, but shall have place in the heart of every wife that loves, until the end of time; and it shall be called by my name.

But if one of us must go first, it is my prayer that it shall be I; for he is strong, I am weak, I am not so necessary to him as he is to me—life without him would not be life; how could I endure it? This prayer is also immortal, and will not cease from being offered while my race continues. I am the first wife; and in the last wife I shall be repeated.

At Eve’s Grave

Adam: Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.

William Dean Howells (1905)

For forty years his English has been to me a continual delight and astonishment. In the sustained exhibition of certain great qualities—clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and enforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing—he is, in my belief, without his peer in the English-writing world. Sustained. I intrench myself behind that protecting word. There are others who exhibit those great qualities as greatly as he does, but only by intervaled distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches of veiled and dimmer landscape between; whereas Howell’s moon sails cloudless skies all night and all the nights.