Christian Science - Couverture rigide

Twain, Mark

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0195101553 ISBN 13 : 9780195101553

Editeur : Oxford University Press Inc, 1996

Synopsis

Christian Science begins, as Garry Wills notes in his introduction, with Twain's description of a man who "falls off a cliff and finds his bones projecting from him like the arms of a hat rack. After a course of treatment from a Christian Science practitioner, he calls in a veterinarian and pays the Christian Scientist with an imaginary check for an imaginary cure." Although Twain recognized that everyone was born with "the power which a man's imagination has over his body to heal it or make it sick," he was deeply suspicious of the empire-building, power-mongering, delusions, and evasions of the founder of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, Mary Baker Eddy. Wills notes that "Christian Science can be read at several levels, all rewarding--first, as a satire on Christian Science's wilder pretensions and its founder's deceptions; then, as an example of Twain's regard for language as the indicator of mental and moral conditions; and finally as part of a biographical descent into the nihilism of his last days. On all these counts the book gets us very close to the heart of American culture."

A propos du livre

Biographie de l'auteur

MARK TWAIN was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, the son of John Marshall Clemens, an avowed freethinker, and his wife, Jane, a believer and connoisseur of the occult. These two opposing forces—freethought and spiritualism—colored the young Twain's view of the world and would later serve as material for his books.

As a child, Twain knew both violence and tragedy. In the town of Hannibal, Missouri, where he lived from 1839 to 1853, shootings and attempted shootings were not unusual events. Twain's older brother Benjamin died when Twain was only six; a few months later, the family lost their home to debt. When Twain was twelve, his father died.

It was at this time that Twain left school to go to work in order to help his financially strapped family, first as a printer's apprentice and later as a journeyman printer; he was also a river pilot, a prospector, and a roving newspaper reporter. Twain's journalistic travels took him throughout the United States as well as to South America, Europe, and the Middle East, from where he sent back entertaining travel letters. While a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, he adopted the pen name Mark Twain. His scathing, observant articles began to earn him a wide and loyal readership. Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain made his readers, and later his listeners during his lecture tours, familiar with his life: skill­fully blending the real and the fictional, he created the char­acter of Mark Twain whom Americans—and the world—recognized and loved in his many books, including The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches (1867); Innocents Abroad (1869); Roughing It (1872); The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876); and his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

Eulogized by William Dean Howells as "the Lincoln of our literature," Twain achieved great fame from his writing and earned a fortune. He lost this, however, following his involvement in a failed publishing house venture; thereafter, Twain lectured to clear his debts. The final two decades of Twain's life were marked, as were his first years, by a series of tragedies: during these years he lost in quick succession his beloved wife, Livy; a favorite nephew; his daughters Susy and Jean; and his sister, Pamela. Twain had toyed with the idea that life is a dream and that human emotions and expe­riences are delusions. His work at this time reflects his grow­ing gloominess, pessimism, and contempt for organized reli­gion: Extracts from Adam's Diary (1904) and Eve's Diary (1906) satirized Scripture; Christian Science (1907) ridiculed Mark Baker Eddy's new religion. This is the period, too, of Twain's vitriolic Letters from the Earth (1906; first published in 1962) and The Mysterious Stranger, several versions of which were written during 1905-06 and which was posthu­mously published in 1916. Here Twain denies the existence of a benign Providence, a soul, or an afterlife. Indeed, reality itself is taken away as the Stranger in this antireligious tale—the angel-boy, Satan—asserts that "nothing exists; all is a dream." This and the other works of Twain's last years belie that popular image of the easy, affable American humorist; they reveal instead a man engaged in an often tortuous strug­gle to discover what life is and what meaning, if any, it holds.

Mark Twain died in Redding, Connecticut, on April 21, 1910.

Présentation de l'éditeur

This last summer, when I was on my way back to Vienna from the Appetite-Cure in the mountains, I fell over a cliff in the twilight, and broke some arms and legs and one thing or another, and by good luck was found by some peasants who had lost an ass, and they carried me to the nearest habitation, which was one of those large, low, thatch-roofed farm-houses, with apartments in the garret for the family, and a cunning little porch under the deep gable decorated with boxes of bright colored flowers and cats; on the ground floor a large and light sitting-room, separated from the milch-cattle apartment by a partition; and in the front yard rose stately and fine the wealth and pride of the house, the manure-pile. That sentence is Germanic, and shows that I am acquiring that sort of mastery of the art and spirit of the language which enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars. There was a village a mile away, and a horse doctor lived there, but there was no surgeon. It seemed a bad outlook; mine was distinctly a surgery case. Then it was remembered that a lady from Boston was summering in that village, and she was a Christian Science doctor and could cure anything. So she was sent for. It was night by this time, and she could not conveniently come, but sent word that it was no matter, there was no hurry, she would give me "absent treatment" now, and come in the morning; meantime she begged me to make myself tranquil and comfortable and remember that there was nothing the matter with me. I thought there must be some mistake. "Did you tell her I walked off a cliff seventy-five feet high?" "Yes." "And struck a boulder at the bottom and bounced?" "Yes." "And struck another one and bounced again?" "Yes." "And struck another one and bounced yet again?" "Yes." "And broke the boulders?" "Yes." "That accounts for it; she is thinking of the boulders. Why didn't you tell her I got hurt, too?" "I did. I told her what you told me to tell her: that you were now but an incoherent series of compound fractures extending from your scalp-lock to your heels, and that the comminuted projections caused you to look like a hat-rack." "And it was after this that she wished me to remember that there was nothing the matter with me?" "Those were her words." "I do not understand it. I believe she has not diagnosed the case with sufficient care. Did she look like a person who was theorizing, or did she look like one who has fallen off precipices herself and brings to the aid of abstract science the confirmations of personal experience?" "Bitte?" It was too large a contract for the Stubenmadchen's vocabulary; she couldn't call the hand. I allowed the subject to rest there, and asked for something to eat and smoke, and something hot to drink, and a basket to pile my legs in; but I could not have any of these things. "Why?" "She said you would need nothing at all." "But I am hungry and thirsty, and in desperate pain." "She said you would have these delusions, but must pay no attention to them. She wants you to particularly remember that there are no such things as hunger and thirst and pain.'' "She does does she?" "It is what she said." "Does she seem to be in full and functionable possession of her intellectual plant, such as it is?" "Bitte?" "Do they let her run at large, or do they tie her up?" "Tie her up?" "There, good-night, run along, you are a good girl, but your mental Geschirr is not arranged for light and airy conversation. Leave me to my delusions."

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Oxford University Press Inc
• Date d'édition: 1996
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0195101553
• ISBN 13: 9780195101553
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 427
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Ufficio Anagrafiche Messaggerie; ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it; ; Via Verdi, 8; Assago Milano; 20090; Italie