Pine Nuts: What would Mark Twain say about mental telegraphy?
Submitted by Jaedyn Young on Sun, 03/03/2024 - 12:12pm
Have you ever thought that maybe you had special powers but did not know how to tap into them? Well you do. We all do, some to a greater extent than others, and Mark Twain was one of the most gifted of all vision-seers. He was in tune to the possibility of two or more people transmitting the same idea back and forth...
“The world was without an electric telegraph for several thousand years; then Professor Henry, the American, Wheatstone in England, Morse on the sea, and a German in Munich, all invented it at the same time.”
And now, Elon Musk says Neuralink's first human patient is able to control a computer’s mouse through thinking.
The strangest thing that has ever befallen me took place inside the Clemens home in Hartford. We were shooting a documentary, and while they were setting up the lighting in the billiards room I wandered aimlessly through the rest of that beautiful domicile.
As I was about to enter a downstairs bedroom, and was reaching for the doorknob, my hand instinctively withdrew, without my knowing why. I would learn, that was the room where Susy died, his daughter of 24 years of age, his light that went out. My hand knew I did not want to enter that room, when my head hadn’t a clue. I attribute that phenomenon to his guiding hand, not mine.
Mark Twain examined the ephemeral science of mental telegraphy in an essay he
published in 1878...
“When it was three in the morning in Nevada it was six in Hartford, where I lay awake thinking about nothing in particular; and just about that time his ideas came pouring into my head from across the continent, and I got up and put them on paper, under the impression that they were my own original thoughts. I am forced to believe that one human mind can communicate with another, over any sort of distance.”
According to Twain, there are no coincidences, merely instances of mental telegraphy that go unexplained. And so we often hear the common expression, “I was just thinking about you!”
Twain goes on to extrapolate, “The telegraph and telephone are going to become too slow for our needs. We must have the thought itself shot into our minds from a distance. Doubtless the thing which conveys our thoughts through the air from brain to brain is a finer and subtler form of electricity, and all we need do is find out how to capture it.”
So yes, there are gifted vision-seers. I’m not one, but I believe Mark Twain was one.
As is our custom, we shall leave the last word to Mr. Twain...
“Thirty yoke of oxen could not have pulled the belief out of me that I was one of the favored ones of the earth, and had seen a vision while wide awake.”
— For more than 35 years, in over 4,000 performances, columnist and Chautauquan McAvoy Layne has been dedicated to preserving the wit and wisdom of “The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope,” Mark Twain. As Layne puts it: “It’s like being a Monday through Friday preacher, whose sermon, though not reverently pious, is fervently American."
Go here for the audio version of this column.
