Whatchu talkin' about, Mark Twain?

"Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination."
- Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger

Gangsta.

It's surprising how timeless certain ideas can be. As a writer, this immortality is both dis- and encouraging: On the one hand, it seems that all the wisdom has been found, wrought, digested, and regurgitated in "Inspirational Quote-a-Day" calendars. But on the other hand, we have these wonderfully knowledgeable guides to teach us things they learned the hard way. And who are we to balk at that? Especially since we can then take those lessons and build on them, make them relevant to ourselves and modern society. After all, Twain couldn't have anticipated what social media would do to happiness quotients, or how the Internet would render sanity an unnecessary prerequisite to amassing thousands of readers (or Twitter followers, but I contend that no one on Twitter is truly sane). (P.S. Follow me on Twitter!)

But Twain was obviously getting at something with this sanity/happiness thing, and the fact that we pluck this one sentence out of a book and put it on t-shirts and coffee mugs speaks to one of two things: either we're rocking the bookworm fashion, or we are able to read between the lines and apply this lesson to our own lives.

Do me a favor and think some more about the Twain quote.

"Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination."

What was your initial reaction? More than likely you considered it, recalling the adage "ignorance is bliss," and then what? Did you dismiss it? After all, it makes madness sound like not such a bad way to spend a life, but you probably don't consider yourself truly insane. Or do you? How do we define insanity in various contexts? How much does this idea apply to something in your own life? Should we all just give up now?

I read an article today titled "30 Lessons Learned by 30." Despite being six years from the dreaded 30 (I hear it's not that bad!), I found myself immediately applying these one-liner lessons to my own life, evaluating how well I perform them on a daily basis, making mental notes to try harder to prioritize relationships, to be grateful and giving and loving, not to judge others. It's easy to roll your eyes at such well-meaning advice, to resist acknowledging that an entire life's lesson fits so easily into ten words. But understanding that lesson requires some background knowledge, some empathy with the situation. It's hard to argue with maxims like "Honesty is the best policy in relationships. The truth will come out eventually" -- but if you don't have any experience with dishonesty in relationships, then this means nothing to you. It is through life experience that we're able to boil down lessons into easy-to-digest tidbits. It's the reason cliches work and refuse to die: at some point, we realize they're all true.

This is also why grandmothers have so many things embroidered on pillows and hand-painted on adorable signs hanging around their house. Aging brings an understanding of and trust in digestible wisdom. And it's why young people, no matter how smart they are, will always be stupid: we simply don't have the years to back up what we claim to know. Experience trumps every other form of knowledge, always. Take it from a (still relatively stupid) young person who would love nothing more than to write a book that establishes a cliche that winds up on a coffee mug. It's the American dream, I tell ya.

I should mention that the opening quote was said by the main character of the unfinished and posthumously published novel The Mysterious Stranger. That character happens to be the nephew of Satan, and he spends the book ruminating on "the damned human race." It's heady stuff. The character goes on to say:

"No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is. Only the mad can be happy, and not many of those. The few that imagine themselves kings or gods are happy, the rest are no happier than the sane. Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind at any time, but I have been referring to the extreme cases. I have taken from this man that trumpery thing which the race regards as a Mind; I have replaced his tin life with a silver-gilt fiction; you see the result - and you criticize! I said I would make him permanently happy, and I have done it. I have made him happy by the only means possible to his race - and you are not satisfied!" He heaved a discouraged sigh, and said, "It seems to me that this race is hard to please."

No kidding, dude.