Spencer Heath Archive

Item 223

Pencil notes on notepad paper for a talk to be given at the Astor Hotel, New York City, before the Mark Twain Association of New York, on September 28, 1958.

     Variety is said to be the spice of life. It is also the saving grace of human nature. The animal nature in man — the sub-human in him — seeks nothing more than comfortably to exist, to find an easy-going mode of life, the optimum of conditions necessary for continued existence and that conditions shall continue that way without change. But the human nature in man — that which is distinctive and peculiar to him and sets him above and apart /from/ the animal — is far different. This truly human nature is not satisfied merely to exist, it does not want things to be always the same. It seeks contrast, variety, adventure. It is galled by monotony, finds relief in change and is not dismayed but is allured by the unknown.

     This higher human nature is most intrigued by extremes — the bud and the flower, seed and fruit, the micro and the macroscopic, the Beauty and the Beast, heroes and villains, philosophers and fools.

     Nor are we content with any cow-like contemplation of things as they are. We love mimicry, the simulation of the real, the grotesque resemblance, paradoxical extremes.

     All of which is to say that the higher man has humors. We love to be humored in our sense of humor, to be carried out of the confines of our immediate and limited selves.

     There are cynics and satirists, masters of invective; they may be admired but they cannot be loved. The true humorist is the philosopher who puts on cap and bells and makes merry music wherever he goes. Such was our hero, Mark Twain. We love him for his extremes, for his sense in the guise of nonsense, his paradox of the casual and superficial carrying overtones of the real and profound, his pretense of naiveté

                                      /Breaks off/