Twain and Peterson

I have long admired Mark Twain, not because of any political trends, from either the right or the left, but because he always seemed to me a profoundly wise and decent man. Character trumps tribalism.

I also have a powerful love for Peterson pipes, a matter of preference, surely, but I find it no accident that, as the old advert used to say, the thinking man smokes a Peterson pipe.

When one of my favorite writers happens to smoke my favorite pipe, I know that there is a God. 

As silly as it might sound, an old photo of Twain chomping on a Peterson tells me that the world isn't half as bad as I would like to believe. A fellow who can enjoy a good smoke, and knows the right vehicle for the smoking, is clearly a fellow who has his head on straight. 

What? Smoking will kill me? Perhaps, but I refuse to engage in your battle. You think that living longer is best, and I think that living better is best. 

Twain himself said it nicely:

I don’t want any of your statistics; I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it. I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering how much a man’s health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years’ indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking. . . . And you never try to find out how much solid comfort, relaxation, and enjoyment a man derives from smoking in the course of a lifetime (which is worth ten times the money he would save by letting it alone), nor the appalling aggregate of happiness lost in a lifetime by your kind of people from not smoking.

Smoking pot is now cool and healthy, and I wish you the best of luck with it. Please leave me alone with my own humble enjoyment. 

You always tell me that my kind should die off, that my views mean I have no right to live, so why should you object to my pipe a day? By your worship of holy science, it will rid you of me all the quicker,

I understand. You so love what is in fashion, that you must hate what is out of fashion. You cannot bear a man who is not exactly like you. This is why I love Mark Twain over a gutless follower.

One of my greatest treasures is a set of two Peterson pipes given to me by my parents. It includes a reproduction of a system pipe that Mark Twain himself smoked, as well as a poker meant to evoke the corncob pipes that Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer would have smoked by the river. 

It has taken me twenty years, but I have learned to smoke my pipe with moderation and with peace. I wish that sort of contentment for everyone, and I wish to deny it to no one. 

I remain convinced that almost all of our problems come from bossy people trying to tell other people what to do. Twain understood that we should allow people to live on their own terms. That makes him a hero for me.

—3/2017