Odds n' Ends
Another of Dave's off-topic musings:
The Mysterious Stranger
Written by Mark Twain between 1897 and 1908, He never finished a final version.
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The work was published posthumously in 1916 by Harper & Brothers.
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Editorial Alterations: Literary executor Albert Bigelow Paine pieced together and heavily edited the text into a single narrative, a version later recognized as an editorial compilation rather than a finished novel by Twain himself.
Plot Overview
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The Setting: The most famous published version is set in 1590 in a remote Austrian village called Eseldorf (German for "Assville" or "Donkeytown").
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The Boys: The story is narrated by Theodor Fischer, the church organist's son, who along with his friends Nikolaus Bauman and Seppi Wohlmeyer, lives a simple life until meeting a charismatic traveler.
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The Stranger: The stranger reveals himself to be an angel named Satan (specifically the sinless, 16,000-year-old nephew of the biblical Satan), though he travels under the alias Philip Traum.
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The Conflict: Satan uses supernatural powers to expose the boys to the pettiness of human existence, the hypocrisy of moral sense, and the horrific violence provoked by religious belief.
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The Climax: The novella concludes with a haunting, existential revelation that the physical world, God, heaven, and hell are nothing more than a grotesque, lonely dream created by the narrator himself.
If this "rings any bells" with you the entire Novella is short and, like all of Mark Twain's writing, is well crafted entertainment.
Narrative Snippet, Satan's 1600 year-old nephew speaking to his earthbound friend Theodor of the absurdity of Theodor's beliefs.
It was electrical. By God! I had had that very thought a thousand times in my musings! “Nothing exists; all is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you!” “I!” “And you are not you—you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought.
I myself have no existence; I am but a dream—your dream, creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this, then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made me.... “I am perishing already—I am failing—I am passing away. In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever—for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better! “Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago—centuries, ages, ​eons, ago!—for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities.
Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction!
Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!...
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​“You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier. “It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!” He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.