Comets and Eschatons

We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead -- and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.

-Mark Twain

Sort of a high speed pass this morning, due to a late start, which in turn was due to P and me sleeping fitfully and barely at all last night. Mercifully for her, P's one case today cancelled, and she's downstairs right now fixing red chile in her PJs.

Why the insomnia? My guess is that it was our deep subconscious processing the very disturbing but brilliantly witty movie we watched last night, Don't Look Up. The movie begins with two geeky astronomers, one a professor and one a grad student, played by Leonardo de Caprio and Jennifer Lawrence, making an unpleasant discovery. A new comet has appeared in the skies, nine kilometers across, and it's coming right at us.

And by "us" I mean America in 2021, so you can see where this is headed. An incompetent narcissistic president, played by Meryl Streep, worries only about how this is going to distract the country from the fact that her SCOTUS nominee turns out to be an ex-porn star with naked selfies of the POTUS that are the talk of social media. The talking heads on the news programs try to find ways to turn news of the annihilation of all life on earth into a joke--"I hope that comet is headed for a certain house on the coast of New Jersey owned by my ex-wife," quips one. A creepy tech billionaire (played by Mark Rylance, who steals the movie) convinces the president to call off an effort to blow up the comet in space because he's learned there are trillions of dollars in minerals embedded in its core and he wants to mine it for himself.

In turn, the country divides between those in the scientific community who want to save the planet and those who distrust the pointy-headed scientists who obviously don't care about jobs and the economy.

Meanwhile, the mass of rock and fire draws ever closer, but the POTUS and her political troops create the slogan "Don't Look Up" and emblazon it on hats, t-shirts, and lapel pins as they go on tour hosting raucous rallies full of mostly undereducated, middle-aged white people.

And the rock keeps getting closer.

The movie's last five minutes are jarring, can't get it out of your head jarring, but we sat there for two hours knowing it was coming, was inevitable. And that was sort of the point.

Believe it or not, Don't Look Up is also pretty funny, if you have the capacity to laugh at the destruction of all life on earth in one big blast. But isn't death the funniest thing of all? And why are we so disturbed at an eschaton that takes us all at once, while we ignore our own personal eschaton that may not be the end of the world for everyone, but it certainly is for us?

Comets were the thing that bound yesterday together. The other day I noted to Peg that Mark Twain's study is right next door in Elmira, on the campus of Elmira College. We decided this Boxing Day would be as good a time as any to go see it.

Twain was born in the year that Halley's Comet appeared in the night sky in 1835, and he died when it reappeared in 1910. A cosmic harbinger.

He married a wealthy woman from Elmira, and for decades made his way up here during the summers. Some of his most famous writing was here in this little gazebo study, where he composed Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as he looked down at the Chemung River in the valley below.

I read once that the reason for this solitary writing spot was that Twain smoked cigars incessantly while he wrote, and his wife couldn't stand the smell. Maybe so, but in my experience one has to go to a lonely place to write, so it made practical sense as well.

In 1952 they dragged the study down the hill to the campus of Elmira College, where it sits today.

It's fairly spartan inside, but inviting with a fireplace and plenty of natural light.

Unable to get inside, and shivering a little in the brisk wind, we made our way back to the car and drove a little ways up the hill to the massive Woodlawn Cemetery where the whole Clemens family is buried.

The place is absolutely massive, spread over acres and acres of rolling hills.

The winding paths that lead to the Clemens plot are well-marked, and soon we found where Mark Twain, his wife Livy, two daughters, and his son-in-law are all buried.

He and the SIL share the same headstone, at the latter's request. The inscription at the bottom was placed there by Twain's daughter.

Several of the headstones had coins resting on them, quarters or pennies mostly. We looked up the tradition and the only thing we found online had to do with veterans visiting one another's graves. Neither Clemens nor his son-in-law, a famous musician who was once the conductor of the Detroit Symphony, fit that role.

There's a lot of tragedy up on this hill. He first buried his girl Susy here, dead at 24 from spinal meningitis. The words of the poem aren't his, but they capture a pain I can't even imagine.

Eight years later his beloved wife Livy succumbed to a host of health problems that had plagued her since she was a teenager. She died down closer to the City, but was brought home to the family plot here in Elmira. She was 58.

The German reads, ""God be merciful to you, O my joy."

Finally, a year before his death, Clemens lost his daughter Jean at 29. She was an epileptic, and drowned in the bathtub. The grief of the words on her headstone is palpable.

Clemens himself would die four months later, as Halley's Comet returned to the skies.

That last daughter's death really hit me hard, brought tears to my eyes in fact. I recall seven years ago now, right about this time in fact, when my youngest son's epilepsy came out of nowhere in his teenage years, as had Jean Clemens's. I was frantic for information, trying to understand the condition and its causes and what we could do to protect my little guy. I found my way to a chat room of parents who were raising kids with seizure disorder, some far more debilitated that what we were experiencing. One afternoon I typed something to the effect that his seizures were horrifying to witness, and I feared they'd kill him one day.

"Oh, the seizures aren't what will get him in the end," one parent dryly replied. "He'll fall down the stairs and break his neck. Or fall in the street or on subway tracks. Or just drown in the bathtub one day."

I was not comforted.

Twain lived this horror all the way to the end, and eventually all but one of the girls and women who filled his life with love preceded him up here to this shady spot at Woodlawn. No wonder he didn't last much longer.

Time for me to do a little billable work, there being no comet on the horizon that will eliminate the need to worry about paying the bills.