---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Rhonda Underwood <prettyidangel@yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, Feb 29, 2024, 10:17 PM
Subject: Mark Twain
To: Henry McClure <mcre13@gmail.com>
From: Rhonda Underwood <prettyidangel@yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, Feb 29, 2024, 10:17 PM
Subject: Mark Twain
To: Henry McClure <mcre13@gmail.com>
Just found this on a facebook post...
Beneath the laughter, beneath the drawl and the pen name Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens carried a heavy heart. Money slipped through his fingers like river water. It seemed every ambitious scheme, every promise of fortune, turned to dust in the end.
Worse than any failed business deal was the empty space where a loved one used to be. His boy, Langdon, taken by fever. Later, his beloved Olivia, and their daughters too - sickness and fate seemed to have it out for him.
Sometimes the grief was a fist squeezing tight in his chest, other times just a hollowness, an echo where laughter used to bounce back at him. He started to see the world different, the jokes catching in his throat. They called his later writing "darker," but maybe his eyes were finally clearing.
Then there were the critics, clucking their tongues over his stories. Too bold, they said, too close to the bone. Like he didn't carry his own scars, know the sting of hypocrisy, the false piety that rang loud on a Sunday morning and faded quick by Monday.
Still, he had to keep writing. Debts piled up, and a man with an empty belly and an empty house gets desperate. So, he put on the Mark Twain mask, dished out the witticisms folks expected. But some nights, it was Samuel Clemens alone with his pen, scratching at truths too bleak for the lecture halls and laughing audiences.
His struggles, they weren't the whole of the man, but they carved channels in his soul. Those channels, that's where some of the deepest, truest words flowed from.
