26 June 2021
Review: Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven. Mark Twain 1907
I read a collection of short stories recently by Mark Twain. This included, among others, The Celebrated Jumping Frog, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, and Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.
My comments here are about Captain Stormfield’s adventure. The story is the travels of the captain to heaven. He has traveled around the universe and finally arrives—at the wrong gate.
He expects Saint Peter but finds something completely unrecognizable. There is a large communication gap.
‘“Well,” says I, “I don’t know anything more to say—unless I lump things, and just say I’m from the world.”
“Ah,” says he, brightening up, “now that’s something like! What world?”
Peters, he had me, that time. I looked at him, puzzled, he looked at me, worried. Then he burst out—
“Come, come, what world?”
Says I, “Why, the world, of course.”
“The world!” he says. “H’m! there’s billions of them! . . . Next!”’
It takes awhile for the gate keepers to realize what has happened. Stormfield, after racing a comet on the way there has gotten off course and arrived at one of the thousand gates to heaven. He is then sent along his way to find the gate he expects and describes some of things he sees.
He arrives at St. Peter’s gate and is relieved to find they understand him. Off he goes to heaven and along the way he sees piles of harps, wings, and a bunch of exhausted bored looking people. Once he arrives at his destination wearing his wings and carrying his harp he realizes something is wrong and someone explains what has happened. All the piles of junk are being discarded by the people who arrive at heaven and think singing, harp playing, and praising God are all heaven is. They get bored fast and want to leave to find something fulfilling.
‘“I’ll set you right on that point very quick. People take the figurative language of the Bible and the allegories for literal, and the first thing they ask for when they get here is a halo and a harp, and so on. Nothing that’s harmless and reasonable is refused a body here, if he asks it in the right spirit. So they are outfitted with these things without a word. They go and sing and play just about one day, and that’s the last you’ll ever see them in the choir. They don’t need anybody to tell them that that sort of thing wouldn’t make a heaven—at least not a heaven that a sane man could stand a week and remain sane. That cloud-bank is placed where the noise can’t disturb the old inhabitants, and so there ain’t any harm in letting everybody get up there and cure himself as soon as he comes.’
He kicks around for a while and meets people and talks with them. He finds that heaven is made of people of different ages who do different things. He meets Sandy McWilliams who is a cranberry farmer. Sandy says he is seventy-two and has been in heaven for twenty-seven years.
‘“How old was you when you come up?”
“Why, seventy-two, of course.”
“You can’t mean it!”
“Why can’t I mean it?”
“Because, if you was seventy-two then, you are naturally ninety-nine now.”
“No, but I ain’t. I stay the same age I was when I come.”’
The captain learns that heaven is different for everyone. McWilliams was a cranberry farmer and having a satisfied good life and had no reason to be different in heaven. He wished at one point to be young again and tried it for two weeks before becoming bored and went back to seventy-two and cranberries, an evening alone with a pipe and thinking was heaven to him. He does admit he may try another age later but for now he is content and happy.
‘“Laws, what asses we used to be, on earth, about these things! We said we’d be always young in heaven. We didn’t say how young—we didn’t think of that, perhaps—that is, we didn’t all think alike, anyway. When I was a boy of seven, I suppose I thought we’d all be twelve, in heaven; when I was twelve, I suppose I thought we’d all be eighteen or twenty in heaven; when I was forty, I begun to go back; I remember I hoped we’d all be about thirty years old in heaven. Neither a man nor a boy ever thinks the age he has is exactly the best one—he puts the right age a few years older or a few years younger than he is. Then he makes that ideal age the general age of the heavenly people. And he expects everybody to stick at that age—stand stock-still—and expects them to enjoy it!—Now just think of the idea of standing still in heaven! Think of a heaven made up entirely of hoop-rolling, marble-playing cubs of seven years!—or of awkward, diffident, sentimental immaturities of nineteen!—or of vigorous people of thirty, healthy-minded, brimming with ambition, but chained hand and foot to that one age and its limitations like so many helpless galley-slaves! Think of the dull sameness of a society made up of people all of one age and one set of looks, habits, tastes and feelings. Think how superior to it earth would be, with its variety of types and faces and ages, and the enlivening attrition of the myriad interests that come into pleasant collision in such a variegated society.”’
There are others Stormfield sees and McWilliams explains. One woman is walking around crying all the time. She is crying because her baby had died at two years old and she thought in heaven they would be together. The baby went to heaven but the baby grew in heaven and the mother is sad having missed the baby growing up. McWilliams explains she will eventually realize this is to be expected and get on with her own heaven experience.
This is a fairly long story and one can skim it and still get the idea. I enjoyed the exploration of the idea of heaven. I have always heard heaven as being eternity in the presence of God without any sort of relatable idea of what that might mean. Twain is indicating partly the arrogance of religion in America. I think in his own way he is also showing the needed diversity and fascination of humans. It is not hard for me to think of heaven as a place to grow, learn, enhance oneself.
Worth a read.
[On an opposite note: I read an article back in the eighties. I think it was in Christianity Today ( I wish I had a copy). They described hell as the opposite of the presence of God. Anyone who has ever had a nightmare where you were suspended and unable to touch anything in utter darkness will get the gist. Fascinating.]
Hark 