Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 3.2. “Who Did Not Feel the earthquake?,”
Die Bombe,
23 July 1876. One figure is a
young woman engrossed in a romantic novel; the others are a kissing couple lost in
“seventh heaven.” Seismic humor in the nineteenth-century press cemented the
earthquake's status as a journalistic “sensation.”
earthquake can knock the washbasin out of your hand, and you can stum-
ble as much as you like.'”
57
the first master of earthquake humor was unquestionably Mark twain.
he honed his style writing short sketches for the California papers in the
1860s, before either the press or men of science took the earthquake threat
seriously. his reporting on the severe shock of 8 October 1865 earned him
a reputation as “that funny cuss, Mark twain, who, when his last hour shall
arrive, will probably laugh grim Death out of countenance.”
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As twain later
wrote, “the 'curiosities' of the earthquake were simply endless.”
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Certainly,
he mined them endlessly. In his most extensive account of the earthquake,
twain parodied the style of a naturalist, an earthquake connoisseur: “I have
tried a good many of them here, and of several varieties . . .” With scientific
precision, he described a “specimen belong[ing] to a new, and, I hope, a
very rare, breed of earthquakes.” In what reads as a canny parody of later
psychiatric studies of earthquake victims, twain gave a second-by-second
account of his thought process during the quake: “I will set it down here as
a maxim that the operations of the human intellect are much accelerated
by an earthquake. Usually I do not think rapidly—but I did upon this oc-
casion. I thought rapidly, vividly, and distinctly. With the first shock of the
five, I thought—'I recognize that motion—this is an earthquake.' With the
second, I thought, 'What a luxury this will be for the morning papers.' With
