THE DESCENT.
from The Innocents Abroad (1869)
Twain was quick to dismiss exercise, and any regimented kind certainly was loathsome to him. But it’s not entirely true that he never took exercise. His liked to take walks, long or short, particularly if he was in the company of a cherished friend like the Reverend Joseph Hopkins Twichell, the Civil War chaplain who became pastor of Hartford’s Asylum Hill Congregational Church. With Twichell along, it was as much about the talk as the walk. Twichell was his walking companion in Europe, and those walks became the basis of Twain’s 1880 travel book, A Tramp Abroad. Speaking of walks, a quote widely attributed to Mark Twain is, “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” Twainiacs get downright exorcised over that one, because there’s no evidence he actually said it. We’ll be knocking down some of those questionable quotes as we stroll through these chapters. But he did say:
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.
—1905 speech
I needed exercise, so I employed my agent in setting stranded logs and trees adrift, and I sat on a boulder and watched them go whirling and leaping head over heels down the boiling torrent. When I had had exercise enough, I made the agent take some, by running a race with one of those logs. I made a trifle by betting on the log.
—A Tramp Abroad (1880)
The indirect effect of the athletic atmosphere of Trinity [College, Hartford, Connecticut] is seen in the president and faculty who since the erection of the gymnasium have greatly increased in stature; the direct influence is shown by the young men themselves. The necessity of physical development needs no argument to-day and hardly an explanation. The moral effects I feel inclined to dwell upon. The time will soon come when the moral character of a man will be judged from his physical development. However, let me warn you against the danger of letting up or stopping altogether. I once had a bookkeeper who, taking up gymnastics actively, at once began to bud and blossom all over and extend in various directions; he relaxed his exertions and at length stopped his exercise, and in fourteen months lost sixteen pounds and stole $30,000. Let all take warning from this and keep up your physical development.
—1887 speech
I love work. Why, sir, when I have a piece of work to perform, I go away to myself, sit down in the shade, and muse over the coming enjoyment. Sometimes I am so industrious that I muse too long.
—quoted in Mark Twain: A Biography (1912)
by Albert Bigelow Paine
Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live.
—“Taming the Bicycle”
It is not like studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just as you think you’ve got it, they spring the subjunctive on you, and there you are. No—and I see now plainly enough, that the great pity about the German language is, that you can’t fall off it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to make you attend strictly to business.
—“Taming the Bicycle”
There was a row of low stepping-stones . . . They gave me the worst falls I ever got in that street, except those which I got from dogs. I have seen it stated that no expert is quick enough to run over a dog; that a dog is always able to skip out of his way. I think that that may be true: but I think that the reason he couldn’t run over the dog was because he was trying to. I did not try to run over any dog. But I ran over every dog that came along. I think it makes a great deal of difference. If you try to run over the dog he knows how to calculate, but if you are trying to miss him he does not know how to calculate, and is liable to jump the wrong way every time. It was always so in my experience. Even when I could not hit a wagon I could hit a dog that came to see me practice. They all liked to see me practice, and they all came, for there was very little going on in our neighborhood to entertain a dog.
—“Taming the Bicycle”
I had been familiar with that street for years, and had always supposed it was a dead level; but it was not, as the bicycle now informed me, to my surprise. The bicycle, in the hands of a novice . . . notices a rise where your untrained eye would not observe that one existed; it notices any decline which water will run down. I was toiling up a slight rise, but was not aware of it. It made me tug and pant and perspire; and still, labor as I might, the machine came almost to a standstill every little while. At such times the boy would say: “That’s it! take a rest—there ain’t no hurry. They can’t hold the funeral without you.”
—“Taming the Bicycle”
Well, say, this beats croquet. There’s more go about it!
—quoted on football in the New York World (1900)
The billiard table is better than doctors—and I walk not less than ten miles every day with the cue in my hand. And the walking is not the whole of the exercise, nor the most health-giving part of it, I think. Through the multitude of the positions and attitudes it brings into play every muscle in the body and exercises them all.
—1906 letter
Now, the true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking. The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk. It is no matter whether one talks wisdom or nonsense, the case is the same, the bulk of the enjoyment lies in the wagging of the gladsome jaw and the flapping of the sympathetic ear.
—A Tramp Abroad (1880)
There would be a power of fun in skating if you could do it with somebody else’s muscles.
—1874 letter
I am no lazier now than I was forty years ago, but that is because I reached the limit forty years ago. You can’t go beyond possibility.
—Autobiography
