'There never was an uninteresting life'

 

“There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.   (As writers) We recognize that there are no trivial occurrences in life if we get the right focus on them.” – Mark Twain

 

 When I was a kid I found myself mesmerized by Mark Twain’s writing.  I clearly could become Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn or any of the other characters he brought to life.  I wished not only to be them but to be in the places in which they were living, and when I opened one of his books I was immediately transported from our South Dakota farm to the streets of Hannibal, MO or a raft on the Mississippi River.

 

He was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on this date in 1835, shortly after a visit by Halley’s Comet.  He famously predicted he would "go out with it" too, and he died the day following the comet's subsequent return in April of 1910. 

 

“Anybody can have ideas,” Twain wrote to an author friend.  “The difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.”