The Next 2024 Park Church Summer Lecture Gets Cosmic

Posted on by Center for Mark Twain Studies

The 2024 Park Church Summer Lecture Series, organized by the Center for Mark Twain Studies (CMTS), continues at 7:00 p.m., Wednesday, July 24 at The Park Church and will continue each Wednesday through July. The lectures are free and open to the public and recordings of the lectures will be posted to the CMTS website.

Edward Guimont, Bristol Community College, will present “The Cosmic Mark Twain.”

Mark Twain was born on 30 November 1835, only a few weeks after the appearance of Halley’s Comet. Throughout his life he believed he was destined to die when the comet next returned. His prediction was born out, as he died at his Stormfield, Connecticut residence on 21 April 1910, a day after Halley’s closest approach. Twain named his mansion after the last story published in his lifetime, “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” in which comets are depicted as the spirits of the dead. In between, comets prominently feature in two of Twain’s less well-known stories, “A Curious Pleasure Excursion” (1874) and “A Letter from the Comet” (c. 1880s).

1985 US stamp commemorating Twain’s life and Halley’s return

Twain was far from the only author interested in comets during his lifetime. In 1877, Jules Verne wrote Off on a Comet (with several parallels to “A Curious Pleasure Excursion”), in which several people are swept up onto the fictional comet Gallia; this has been identified as the “first vision of a human community surviving in a small, self-sustaining Earth-like environment far from the Earth itself.” In 1883, Ignatius L. Donnelly published the ostensibly-nonfiction Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, where he proposed that a comet impact had destroyed Atlantis and caused mass extinction. While a direct influence on modern conspiracy theorist Graham Hancock, Donnelly’s proposal also anticipated the 1980 Alvarez hypothesis of cometary dinosaur extinction. Twain himself died in the midst of a mass panic caused by the Earth’s passage through the tail of Halley’s Comet. Thousands believed traces of cyanogen detected in its gasses would kill all life on Earth, with some committing suicide as a result, anticipating the Heaven’s Gate cult’s response to the Hale-Bopp comet at the century’s close.

During Twain’s lifetime, therefore, writing about comets originated modern scientific notions of celestial mass extinction and space colonization, as well as modern pseudoscientific notions of imminent apocalypse and ancient fallen super-civilizations, developments which the well-read Twain was familiar with, and in some cases contributed to. “The Cosmic Mark Twain” will explore those issues, along with other space-related concepts that Twain was interested in—such as the search for a ninth planet beyond Pluto—and ideas that were popular during his lifetime with resonance for the present, such early UFO sightings.

Edward Guimont received his PhD in history from the University of Connecticut, and is currently Associate Professor of World History at Bristol Community College in Fall River, Massachusetts. His first monograph, When the Stars Are Right: H. P. Lovecraft and Astronomy (coauthored with Horace A. Smith) was published by Hippocampus Press in 2023; he is working on his second book, The Power of the Flat Earth Idea, for Palgrave Macmillan. He participated in the 2023 Quarry Farm Symposium and is a 2024 Quarry Farm Fellow, researching Twain’s interest in astronomy for a forthcoming publication. His work has appeared in Contingent Magazine, The Lovecraft Annual, Quest: The History of Spaceflight, and Interdisciplinary Science Reviews.

The Park Church Summer Lectures are open to the public and begin at 7:00 p.m. in The Park Church. The Series will continue on Wednesdays throughout July with recordings of each posted to the CMTS website.

See Additional 2024 Park Church Summer Lectures:

  • Wednesday, July 31 – Barbara Snedecor, “‘the dearest little woman in the world’: Letters of Olivia Clemens to her Sister, Susan Crane”

About The Trouble Begins Lecture Series

In 1984, the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies initiated a lecture series, The Trouble Begins at Eight lecture series. The title came from the handbill advertising Mark Twain’s October 2, 1866 lecture presented at Maguire’s Academy of Music in San Francisco. The first lectures were presented in 1985. By invitation, Mark Twain scholars present lectures in the fall and spring of each year, in the Barn at Quarry Farm or at Peterson Chapel in Cowles Hall on Elmira College’s campus. All lectures are free and open to the public.

In 2016, CMTS expanded the series and in partnership with the Park Church, created the Park Church Summer Lectures Series.  Founded in 1846 by a group of abolitionists, The Park Church has been a strong presence in Elmira’s history and some of its congregation were close friends and family members to Mark Twain. Known for its striking architectural features, The Park Church contained Elmira’s first public library and has a long history of charitable service to the Elmira community.