“What Can Be Done” (A Quarry Farm Testimonial)

EDITOR’S NOTE: We occasionally feature testimonials from recent Quarry Farm Fellows and Residents, which combine conversational illustrations of their research and writing process with personal reflections on their experiences as Twain scholars, teachers, and fellows. Applications for Quarry Farm Fellowships are due each Winter. Find more information HERE.

I recall Mark Twain proclaiming at some point that Quarry Farm was ideal for a summer retreat because there was often a pleasant breeze and it was always cool on East Hill. During my residency in late June, it was breezy, for sure. But an early-season heat dome made for unsettled weather. Cool it was not, either in the house or on the famed porch that overlooks a portion of the Allegheny Plateau. The first week was hot and humid. The second week was exceptionally hot and humid. It rained a lot. The air was heavy. Twain was right, though. There is something about being on that hill “when the storms sweep the remote valley and the lightning flashes above the hills beyond.” His friend and neighbor (in the Nook Farm area of Hartford, Connecticut) and co-author of The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873), Charles Dudley Warner, was right, too, when he quipped that people always talk about the weather but never do anything about it. Because what can be done? We do what we can, come rain or shine. That’s the point.

In many ways, being at Quarry Farm felt a lot like being at home on my own twelve-acre farmstead. There are no goats, and no chickens, and no barn cats, and no guardian dogs. Nevertheless, the property sits on a hilltop in the woods. My own little parcel is nestled on a hillside in northern Connecticut. It’s about halfway up, and the pasture slopes southward. And so on. There is a general quiet to the surroundings. I am used to that. The quietude on the other hand….

I mention this routine not only because it was a big part of my residency, but also because it bespeaks a core aspect of my recent scholarly interests. A good deal of my published writing could be catalogued under humor (or comedy) studies. Yet it is motivated by my training at the intersections of rhetorical theory and cultural criticism. So, I have researched and written about everything from editorial cartoons through graffiti and street art to wartime caricatures and, lately, entire comic (and anti-comic) discourses that animate culture and politics. These days, my inspiration has moved me to study senses of humor as part and parcel of our human nature, insofar as they are inseparable from our natural condition as animals.

“A General Good Time.” Illustration from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Chpt. 12.

So, it seemed reasonable enough to me that Twain’s cosmic, otherworldly representations are intimately connected to his more earthly portrayals of our human comedy. The devil in Twain’s prose, i.e., in The Mysterious Stranger (a posthumously published iteration of various stories about that fallen angel and his entanglements with humanity) and in his Letters From the Earth, lets on that the human animal is strange among all others because of that pesky Moral Sense. Hence why we encounter elsewhere, for instance in the essay “The Lowest Animal,” or “Man’s Place in the Animal World,” images of human beings as animals that wage war, enslave, invent religions, and more, as opposed to nonhuman animals that are not corrupted by morality. And, as I discovered, those animals are unequivocally animals that laugh. Ravens. Fishes. Jackasses. Jays. Dogs. These animals goad themselves to laughter, in their own right, and at times they even laugh at us. How, I wondered, might Twain’s works exhibit a comic sensibility about, and perhaps even a latent definition of, the laughing animal? Or, as I pondered in “The Descent of the Laughing Animal,” a lecture I gave toward the end of my residency at the Park Church as part of the Trouble Begins Lecture Series, how might the animality of laughter that permeates Twain’s works enable us to think differently about humor?

Christopher J. Gilbert, “Descent of the Laughing Animal” (June 25,  2025 – The Park Church)

No surprise, then, that my time at Quarry Farm had me moving back and forth between my bike and books. I spent as many hours as I could out on that porch, thumbing through my own copies of Twain’s manuscripts and revisiting the anthologies and findings of John Bird, Mark Dawdziak, Shelly Fisher Fishkin, Matthew Guzman, Joan Menefee, Emily VanDette, and others who have explored Twain’s consideration of nonhuman animals. Crucially, whenever the rain wasn’t falling, and whenever I returned from a bike ride, I took time to take in the melodies of songbirds like crows, chickadees, and bluejays. (Sometimes, until it stopped working at the beginning of my second week, the Regulator clock in the kitchen would tick-tock away with its sound of finitude as the birds sang.) They sang me off before my grand, albeit humdrum departures on two wheels, and they continued their singing whenever I rolled back in on that gravel driveway, where I was regularly greeted by the caretaker’s pets—an old dog, Wheezy, and an old cat, Greg. But birds did not sing for me. They sang to each other. For each other. Among themselves. Images of Twain’s laughing jackass sprang readily to mind. Images of his ravens craning their necks and laughing at that man, humiliated by avifauna in the woods of Heidelberg. Images of that owl of Twain’s imagination that did not find anything funny in what stumped the bluejays. Images that came again as I prepared a late dinner on a particularly hot night while the sun set, and a barred owl called in the distance, “Who cooks for you?” I laughed to myself. Indeed, I also spent many, many hours avoiding the heat, making myself unreachable by mosquitos and non-biting midges, in the house in this or that room, wherever I could get the slightest bit of cool breeze through a window or a screen door. Over those two weeks, muddles of notes and citations evolved into sketches of arguments that I am now pursuing in a larger project tentatively titled Tickled: Animals, Egos, Laughter.

To read into and through Twain’s bestiary (in Maxwell Geismar terms) is to realize just how much Samuel Langhorne Clemens in esse and in alias cared about the tensions between humanity and animality, and the categories of existence that animate our situation in the animal kingdom. It has given me new insights into my own experience with nonhuman animals on my farmstead. The barn cats when they seem to grin as they roll around on the wooden planks of the hayloft as I scoop their litterboxes. The bleats of the goats that sometimes come off like guffaws. The fact of creaturely detachment from the day-to-day in what simply goes on as nature takes its course, precisely outside and away from the makeshift, mechanized worlds of our Digital Age. It has given me new appreciations for my longstanding vegetarianism, my ethical stances on animal treatment in our food production systems, and on the very status of all creatures in the scala naturae. To read into and through Twain’s bestiary is to realize not only that laughter is not a uniquely human thing (nor, for that matter, is humor), but also that there is an evolutionary element to the animality of laughter itself, or what I might characterize as a distinctly rhetorical manner of perceiving what is humorous or comical or laughable, and how much that has to do with the ways that animals adapt to their environments, experience and interpret their lived conditions, and utilize instruments of their own making to get by in the natural world. It was in this mindset that it occurred to me during one bike ride what Twain wrote in what I see as his commentary on our descent as laughing animals. “Man is ‘The Animal that Laughs’,” he wrote. “But so does the monkey, as Mr. Darwin pointed out; and so does the Australian bird that is called the laughing jackass. No—Man is the Animal that Blushes. He is the only one that does it—or has occasion to.” What else did Darwin observe? “Blushing,” he pronounced in his follow-up to On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, “is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions.” Alas. The sense of humor merges with the Moral Sense.

In his formative work on comedy in nature, and in what I see as a statement on survival of the fittest doubling as survival of the funniest, Joseph W. Meeker argued that human beings are just one among many animals who ascribe to a comic mode of existence. This might present a tough pill to swallow for anyone who still maintains that comedy is to the human condition as laughter is to humanity. It is probably a propos that among the outside sources I read while at Quarry Farm was Melanie Challenger’s book on becoming more animal. There were moments when I’d be listening to the birds or just trying to cool my body down that I’d dwell on, ahem, the challenge that Challenger puts to us: we need to get over the impulse to justify ourselves to ourselves. In other, more Twain-esque words, we need to “give up the idea that we’re moral.” If we don’t, or maybe because we don’t, a sense of humor risks being made into an expression of our foolish pride, a false promise, a rhetorical trick, a big joke. The body betrays. But so can the mind. So can the Moral Sense. So can a sense of humor. So can a laugh….

I remember returning to Quarry Farm late one morning on the second day of an extended heat warning. I had returned once before that day, briefly, to eat a quick snack and refill a bottle before getting back on the road. I was sweating profusely. I had salt stains all over my cycling kit. The caretaker, Steve, was gardening just beyond the driveway. I was not thinking about what Jackson Lears dubs the “animal spirit” that fuses “body with soul (or mind), and self with world.” I was not recollecting ancient philosophies about bodies influencing minds just as minds (or souls) influence bodies. I was not feeling compelled to reflect on the life principle that moves me to exercise my body as much as my mind, or to revel in the vitalism that allows willpower to spill over into the simple, yet all too complex, essences of breath and muscle, capacities and limitations. I wasn’t mulling over my ideas about Twain. As I was holding the stem of my bike, guiding it over the gravel, I was imagining how people in the late-nineteenth century made it to and from Quarry Farm, navigating as they would have had to those steep hills, which make it so the only way back from anywhere is up.

I approached Steve, greeted him, and jokingly posed this thought to him as a question. Steve smiled.

“They walked a lot,” he said, matter-of-factly.

We both laughed.

I could have easily retorted with something about how, or why, I ride a bike such distances in such oppressive weather. I could have easily waxed poetic about how the scholarly work I do relates to the effort of turning over the pedals. I didn’t, though. Instead, I just let our laughter trail off before I smiled at Steve and ambled back to the house, bike in hand.

Greg, one of the yearlong residents at Quarry Farm