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When you read Twain you realize he is head and shoulders above other authors, even really good authors. How do you measure the level of his genius? I don't know. Physicists used to rate the genius level of other physicists on a scale of 1- 10, and then along came Dick Feynman whom everyone agreed was "off-scale". Twain's ability as a writer might just be "off-scale", too. I have seen estimates of Goethe's and Shakespeare's IQs which are at the top end of all humanity's and I'm quite sure Mark Twain is at least their equal, intellectually.

Thank god for Mark Twain, accessible to the common man, and more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

The term LOL (which means "Laugh Out Loud") takes on a whole new meaning when you read Twain. I remember the last time I laughed out loud like this was when I was commuting back and forth to work from the Upper West Side to Midtown on the IRT. As you know, Manhattan subways are pretty sober places and the cold fluorescent light and the bitter taste/smell of the lingering asbestos brake particles in the air and the other vaguely metallic and pungent smells of the underground train lair lends a sort of uber-reality to the scene (as do the grim faces of the people on the train contending as they are with the harsh business of survival in one of the roughest cities in the world) I was reading Roughing It!, one of Twain's other works, on those hard, cold grey seats on the sides of the train with people on either side of me and across from me and I would burst out laughing every page or so and people would look at me as if there was something wrong with me and I would say, "I'm sorry, this is really funny." And I would hold out the book for them to see and then they would go back to staring out into the space in front of themselves rather than looking at me like I had broken some sort of Law of the Subway. And then I would go back to reading and laughing out loud because Twain is so very, very wry.

It's too bad you can't bottle what Twain has to say, because if you could, you'd be drunker than a 100 Indians dancing in a cornfield on the first sip. It's really priceless.