The maxim assures us that confession is good for the soul (or, if you’ve already purchased this book, let’s hope it’s good for the sold). So, let’s make a quick trip to the full-disclosure department. There’s something wrong with the title of this book: Mark Twain’s Guide to Diet, Exercise, Beauty, Fashion, Investment, Romance, Health, and Happiness. It’s accurate, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. It’s obviously too short. I realize that now. And the reader has my most humble apologies. It has been my intention from the outset to give you your money’s worth, and the title is short-changing the content in this volume. Yes, there are plenty of tips on diet, exercise, beauty, fashion, investment, etc. Yet you’ll also find guidance on politics, religion, parenting, and education, among other things. The advice flows freely, page after page, for as Mark Twain once observed, “Information appears to stew out of me naturally . . . The more I caulk up the sources, the more I leak wisdom.”
The phrase “advice is cheap” used to mean something in this country. When the proverb was coined, after all, coins went a lot further. Advice was cheap, and you got what you paid for. Then inflation hit, and the price of advice skyrocketed. While the shopworn phrase still was treated as common currency in the marketplace of ideas, the phrase had been rendered practically meaningless, worthless, bankrupt, almost a bitter sarcasm.
Most advice you encounter these days is as worthless as ever, but it sure isn’t cheap. Ever walk into a lawyer’s office and ask for advice? Ever examine a bill after seeking a specialist’s medical advice? Seen a therapist lately? Was it cheap?
Ever enroll in an investment seminar? It probably was a terrific get-rich plan—for the person giving the seminar. Ever feel taken after taking in one of those inspirational talks promising eternal bliss, peace, and happiness? The speaker undoubtedly left pretty happy. Ever sign up for one of those celebrity-endorsed diet plans? Chances are you were considerably lighter, all right—in the wallet.
As the dollar figure attached to advice has increased, so has the amount of it. There are countless self-help books published every year. There are infomercials coming at you from all directions on the TV landscape.
I’m not in any way suggesting that the pop-culture woods are full of charlatans. I’m not suggesting that at all. I’m saying it outright. If all of this stuff was more than guff (that’s the nice word for it), we’d be the happiest, healthiest, wealthiest, slimmest, trimmest, least-stressed, best-adjusted, best-conditioned, best-natured, most-fashionable people imaginable. Beware the type of person Mark Twain described in his story “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg”: “He had only one vanity, he thought he could give advice better than any other person.”
That person probably is a great believer in Twain’s suggestion, “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.” This breed undoubtedly also subscribes to a saying Twain included in Following the Equator: “To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.”
That’s not to say there aren’t honest, responsible, helpful sources of advice and inspiration. And if you’ve found one of those rare gems, I’d be the last to question its promises.
This book makes no such promises, but it does offer a smile or two, and perhaps some common sense in the matter of seeking and taking advice. If any of this directly leads to you being happier, that’s by design. If any of this directly leads to you being healthier, that’s by mistake. Fair warning on this score: Twain cautions that strict adherence to this politically incorrect advice may kill you. But then again, you may die laughing just considering his mirthful maxims and wacky witticisms.
Although laced with a delightful and offbeat brand of wisdom, Twain’s advice runs contrary to almost every self-help book that has ever hit the bestseller lists. At the same time, as insane as much of this advice will seem, it brings some badly needed sanity to the discussion of advice and inspiration, diet and exercise, fashion and finance, politics and religion, parenting and childhood.
If you wish to know the spirit in which this advice is offered, consult Twain’s “Seventieth Birthday” speech, delivered at Delmonico’s Restaurant in Manhattan on December 5, 1905:
“I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way: by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else. It sounds like an exaggeration, but that is really the common rule for attaining old age. When we examine the programme of any of these garrulous old people we always find that the habits which have preserved them would have decayed us . . . I will offer here, as a sound maxim, this: That we can’t reach old age by another man’s road.”
The writer born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Missouri on November 30, 1835, then gives an example of this:
“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. Eleven hours. That is all right for me, and is wholesome, because I have never had a headache in my life, but headachy people would not reach seventy comfortably by that road, and they would be foolish to try it. And I wish to urge upon you this—which I think is wisdom—that if you find you can’t make seventy by any but an uncomfortable road, don’t you go.
“I desire now to repeat and emphasize that maxim: We can’t reach old age by another man’s road. My habits protect my life, but they would assassinate you.”
There is the real grand plan for a long, happy life. And the notion of Twain’s comfortable road is the path this book follows, even as it takes us through some pretty difficult territory. Cutting your own path, after all, can be as challenging as it is difficult. Sticking to it can be even trickier, particularly, as Twain warns us, there always will be someone waiting around the next turn ready to reform you, to improve you, to take all the pleasure out of your life and replace it with misery. Picture Twain standing behind this joy killer, genially puffing away on one of his beloved stogies and saying, “Don’t let them do it to you . . . don’t do it to yourself.” Well, don’t.
That’s why, more than one hundred years after Mark Twain packed up his cigars and exited this realm on the back of Halley’s Comet, we still turn to him for the occasional push in the right direction. “There’s a Twain quote that covers this,” I often find myself saying, always tempted to add, “and there’s almost always a Twain quote that covers whatever is being discussed.”
See, his cigars were cheap. His advice is priceless.
