A Thanksgiving Sentiment
I was looking for a simple Thanksgiving Day quote. I found more than just that.
I thought I would search to see what Mark Twain had to say about Thanksgiving and American eating habits. Some of my favorite quotes are from Mark Twain’s writings.
Twain has been when of my favorites for some time now. He is a humorist and a satirist (a good combination in my view of things). His writings make me laugh. They sometimes make me sad. Above all, his words make me think and give me a desire to learn more.
In a 1905 New York World Sunday Magazine article titled A Thanksgiving Sentiment, reporter W. O. Inglis asks a simple question of the 70-year-old Twain: “How do you keep so well?”
Twain explains that he had not been well until lately because of “attacks of acute indigestion,” which he had discovered were the result of his “habit, of thirty years’ standing, of eating only one meal a day.”
Twain’s solution? “Three small meals a day, sometimes four, made a wonderful change. The indigestion and the pangs disappeared.”
Twain continues by saying, “Perhaps we Americans eat too much. If we do, I am convinced that the proper cure lies in dividing the food supply into several small meals a day rather than in overloading the digestive machinery at one fell swoop.”
“Aha!” I thought. “I have my quote for the blog.”
I thought that would be all that I would be posting here tonight. But there is more to the article than a simple funny statement from Twain. There is an admonishment. A challenge. A part of history that I was not aware of. A realization that history has repeated and that we have not yet learned from our mistakes.
From King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild:
“I myself knew almost nothing about the history of the Congo until a few years ago, when I noticed a footnote in a book I was reading. Often when you come across something particularly striking, you remember just where you were when you read it. On this occasion I was sitting, stiff and tired, late at night, in one of the far rear seats of an airliner crossing the United States from east to west.
“The footnote was to a quotation from Mark Twain. Twain had made this comment, the note said, when he was part of the worldwide movement against slave labor in the Congo, a system that had taken at least five to eight million lives. Worldwide movement? Five to eight million lives? I was startled.”
Read A Thanksgiving Sentiment and let me know what you think.
I am thankful for knowledge. For wisdom. For history.
