The Comet and the Comic

Posted on May 21, 2017 by Trish and Rob

Actually, Mark Twain was known as a humorist, not a comic. But comic sounded better in the title, and I think Twain would appreciate that.

Here’s a letter to the editor that appeared in the New York Times more than a century ago that puzzles over the parallels between Halley’s Comet and  Twain’s life. I wonder if the New York Times still publishes letters to the editor that recognize synchronicity as they did in 1910.

The New York Times, April 23, 1910

Mark Twain and Halley’s Comet.

To the Editor of The New York Times:

I wish to draw your attention to a peculiar coincidence.
Mark Twain, born Nov. 30, 1835.
Last perihelion of Halley’s comet, Nov. 10, 1835.
Mark Twain died, April 21, 1910.
Perihelion of Halley’s comet, April 20, 1910.

It so appears that the lifetime of the great humorist was nearly identical (the difference being exactly fifteen days) with the last long “year” of the great comet.

  1. FRIDERICI.
    Westchester, N. Y., April 22, 1910

+++

As this quote from Twain  reveals, the famed writer-humorist was well aware of his relationship to the famed comet, and he certainly saw it as a meaningful coincidence.

“I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: “Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.”
– Mark Twain, a Biography

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6 Responses to The Comet and the Comic

  1. Darren says:
    May 22, 2017 at 7:40 am

    I was just watching a You Tube where Jeff Kripal mentions a prophetic dream of Twain’s that came to pass about his dead brother.
    It’s at around the 9 minute mark of the talk and is worth hearing –
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX7WDqZuyvQ

  2. lauren raine says:
    May 21, 2017 at 2:47 pm

    he had a wonderful sense of cosmic humor! I felt that way about Leonard Cohen too – he finished his last (and some say best) album “You Want It Darker”, and then died on the day that Trump became president. A poet to the end.

  3. Adele Aldridge says:
    May 21, 2017 at 9:42 am

    I just wrote something here and it disappeared again. Weird. I was writing that my father was born in 1910 and told me about the comet and the syncro with Mark Twain. He loved Mark Twain’s writing and while he was a firm non-believer in synchros it was he who told me as a child about Twain’s birth and the comet and what a great writer he was. I wonder if when my father turned 75 if he worried about the comet, death, etc. If so he never would have mentioned it. In any case he lived t0 92.

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