I can be sane and happy. And no lame-ass ignorant happiness can compare to the bliss, glory and sense of achievement of successfully achieving happiness in reality.

>>834
You don't seem to have very well understood what Mr Twain is saying. Protip: he's got that angle covered.

wow, nice job Mark. way to bring everyone down.

>>851
Okay, so he has said that ignorant bliss is best. I still rather be free to be happy than indentured to be happy.

>>854

>Okay, so he has said that ignorant bliss is best.
No, he didn't; what he said is that, given the wandering/failed and wicked nature, both ours and the world's, evassion or delussional/insufficient schemes seem to be the only possible ways for us to be happy. Far from condoning us, he's being the hardest critic of human condition of ignorance and its vicious cheap joy...

>I still rather be free to be happy than indentured to be happy.
And I celebrate it: what a wonderful thing to hear from you, actually. What I couldn't grant myself, is if there's any actual way to achieve that authentic (responsable) hapiness of the free men... i.e. if it's even possible to ever be truly free, good, or aware at all. But, in acordance with your statement, let me reformulate it as from my own point of view: I'd rather be aware (as much as I could) and become miserable out of it, than being delussionally happy...

Now: do I can truly live by those words? I don't know. Mr. Twain, with brave pessimism, seem to think that not likely; but the ethical discorse for he stands on this amazing beautiful book, is far more rich and complex than just this.

I can't take Mark Twain seriously. It's just teen literature for its era.

>>859
Yeah, that's true. Not like he was a master at satire or wrote about the social issues of his time in a non-preachy, interesting way or anything like that

>>861

Maybe it's just because I'm not American..but I can't agree with that. Different cultures I guess.

But this is subjective so pretend I never said anything. I'm just BORD.

>>889
Well, he did write a few metric tons of books and essays that weren't Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, too. But yeah, maybe let's just drop it. No harm done.

>>859

>It's just teen literature for its era.

I have to yet see a worthwhile book (worthwhile as in thought provoking, complex, interesting) that couldn't be labeled as 'teen literature'. In the literature thread in /ot/ I even said that I wish I read all of these books I'm reading know as a teenager instead, as I could idenitfy with some ideals and thoughts much better back then.

Is it insane to be happy while knowing the third world is starving and your politicians are creating a 2 class society with you at the bottom? I dont think so.

>>1003
I wouldn't be happy if I saw a woman abort her fetus on the side of the road due to starvation, but I'm sitting here in my lovely brick house posting on an imageboard and eating a burger, so its quite easy for me to be happy.

Sanity is one of those really subjective terms that I tend to avoid at all costs but the passage in the original post does pose some interesting questions.

I suppose that attempting to quantify and distill the total human experience is likely to damn someone's peace of mind, and I think that's what Twain is referring to in 'The Mysterious Stranger'. Certainly it has befuddled me whenever I have foolishly tried to wrap my mind around the proposition. After all, if we are to calculate the myriad comedies and tragedies of human existence you just can't logically arrive at a happy conclusion. The world is a sad place. Humanity is a deeply flawed species. Self-obsessed to the last, and driven by impure motivation.

However, simultaneously, humanity is wondrous and there are many joys to uplift us from this sorry state of affairs, if even for fleeting moments punctuated largely by misery and chaos. I think if we can render ourselves temporarily insane enough to enjoy these moments when they occur we can achieve at least some kind of balance where we are rational enough to care for ourselves and contemplate our purposes with respect to the rest of the world, without draining ourselves of what little zest for life itself we might be able to otherwise eek out.

Speaking of Twain, my writing teacher(Who, ironically, didn't want us to write at all until the very end.) read us some stuff by him. The War Prayer really stuck with me.