In a birthday speech, Twain spoke about habits, laughter, and the necessity of savoring peace.
On Dec. 5, 1905, 170 friends and writers gathered at Delmonico’s in Manhattan to celebrate 70-year-old Mark Twain’s recent birthday. President Theodore Roosevelt sent a telegram of congratulations and praise, the press gave the event play in the papers, and people from around the country saluted Twain as the United States’ premier humorist and storyteller.
But it isn’t this glittering occasion that’s remembered as much as Twain’s address to his audience that evening. He was in fine comedic form, ruminating on “the time of life when you arrive at a new and awful dignity,” and bringing bursts of laughter from the crowd. In that speech, there’s a great deal of wisdom on aging, some of it only implied, that might benefit some of us today.
Twain’s Habits
“I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way: by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else,” Twain said that evening. He pointed out that in the stories told by “garrulous old people we always find that the habits which have preserved them would have decayed us” and that “we can’t reach old age by another man’s road.”
He then expounded on the habits that he practiced that might be poison to others, beginning with his sleep routine. “Since forty I have been regular about going to bed and getting up—and that is one of the main things. I have made it a rule to go to bed when there wasn’t anybody left to sit up with; and I have made it a rule to get up when I had to. This has resulted in an unswerving regularity of irregularity. It has saved me sound, but it would injure another person.”
Of eating, Twain said, “For thirty years I have taken coffee and bread at eight in the morning, and no bite nor sup until seven-thirty in the evening.” Alcohol, he asserted, he could take or leave: “I have no rule about that. When the others drink I like to help, otherwise I remain dry, by habit and preference.”
His cigar smoking, to which he paid considerable attention, would appall many of today’s health-conscious crowd, old or young. “I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time. … It has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake.” He noted, “I will grant, here, that I have stopped smoking now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on principle, it was only to show off; it was to pulverize those critics who said I was a slave to my habits and couldn’t break my bonds.”
As for exercise, forget about it. Twain said: “I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never intend to take any. Exercise is loathsome. And it cannot be any benefit when you are tired; and I was always tired. But let another person try my way, and see where he will come out.”
By Jeff Minick
