Some select highlights from Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Human Psychology
When Tom tricks his friends into painting the fence…
He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
How money influences perception…
There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four–horse passenger–coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.
When the approval of others is worth more than the prize…
It is possible that Tom’s mental stomach had never really hungered for one of those prizes, but unquestionably his entire being had for many a day longed for the glory and the eclat that came with it.
How admiration from others encourages you until the point of fraud…
They began to tell their adventures to hungry listeners-but they only began; it was not a thing likely to have an end, with imaginations like theirs to furnish material.
Reverse psychology defined…
Now he found out a new thing-namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.
We want what we can’t have. There’s a lesson about artificial scarcity here…
however-there was something in that. He could drink and swear, now-but found to his surprise that he did not want to. The simple fact that he could, took the desire away, and the charm of it.
Status alters our perceptions…
Mr. Benton, an actual United States Senator, proved an overwhelming disappointment-for he was not twenty-five.
When Tom and Huck are found to be rich (they found stolen $$) confirmation bias sets in and the narratives about them are retrofit to account for their newfound brilliance…
Wherever Tom and Huck appeared they were courted, admired, stared at. The boys were not able to remember that their remarks had possessed weight before; but now their sayings were treasured and repeated; everything they did seemed somehow to be regarded as remarkable; they had evidently lost the power of doing and saying commonplace things; moreover, their past history was raked up and discovered to bear marks of conspicuous originality. The village paper published biographical sketches of the boys.
Sometimes you just need someone to talk to…
It would be some relief to unseal his tongue for a little while; to divide his burden of distress with another sufferer.
On taking loved ones for granted…
Tom, you’ll look back, some day, when it’s too late, and wish you’d cared a little more for me when it would have cost you so little.
On the temperment of mob psychology. Here Potter goes from being considered guilty without a trial to be exonerated on hearsay…
As usual, the fickle, unreasoning world took Muff Potter to its bosom and fondled him as lavishly as it had abused him before. But that sort of conduct is to the world’s credit; therefore it is not well to find fault with it.
Mental well-being means physical well-being…
such a laugh was money in a-man’s pocket, because it cut down the doctor’s bill like everything.
Mocking customs
When Tom purchases his way to an honor that was meant to be earned…
Tom was therefore elevated to a place with the Judge and the other elect, and the great news was announced from headquarters. It was the most stunning surprise of the decade, and so profound was the sensation that it lifted the new hero up to the judicial one’s altitude, and the school had two marvels to gaze upon in place of one. The boys were all eaten up with envy–but those that suffered the bitterest pangs were those who perceived too late that they themselves had contributed to this hated splendor by trading tickets to Tom for the wealth he had amassed in selling whitewashing privileges. These despised themselves, as being the dupes of a wily fraud, a guileful snake in the grass. The prize was delivered to Tom with as much effusion as the superintendent could pump up under the circumstances; but it lacked somewhat of the true gush, for the poor fellow’s instinct taught him that there was a mystery here that could not well bear the light, perhaps; it was simply preposterous that this boy had warehoused two thousand sheaves of Scriptural wisdom on his premises–a dozen would strain his capacity, without a doubt.
Customs are often illogical…
Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.
On the banality of conformity…
A prevalent feature in these compositions was a nursed and petted melancholy; another was a wasteful and opulent gush of “fine language”; another was a tendency to lug in by the ears particularly prized words and phrases until they were worn entirely out; and a peculiarity that conspicuously marked and marred them was the inveterate and intolerable sermon that wagged its crippled tail at the end of each and every one of them. No matter what the subject might be, a brainracking effort was made to squirm it into some aspect or other that the moral and religious mind could contemplate with edification. The glaring insincerity of these sermons was not sufficient to compass the banishment of the fashion from the schools, and it is not sufficient today; it never will be sufficient while the world stands, perhaps.
How mindless ritual corrodes ingenuity (Twain is critical of organized religion)…
Tom went about, hoping against hope for the sight of one. blessed sinful face, but disappointment crossed him everywhere. He found Joe Harper studying a Testament, and turned sadly away from the depressing spectacle. He sought Ben Rogers, and found him visiting the poor with a basket of tracts. He hunted up Jim Hollis, who called his attention to the precious blessing of his late measles as a warning. Every boy he encountered added another ton to his depression; and when, in desperation, he flew for refuge at last to the bosom of Huckleberry Finn and was received with a Scriptural quotation, his heart broke and he crept home and to bed realizing that he alone of all the town was lost, forever and forever.
Humans are susceptible to quackery and superstition
Describing his Aunt Polly who falls for remedies…
She was one of those people who are infatuated with patent medicines and all new-fangled methods of producing health or mending it. She was an inveterate experimenter in these things. When something fresh in this line came out she was in a fever, right away, to try it; not on herself, for she was never ailing, but on anybody else that came handy. She was a subscriber for all the “Health” periodicals and phrenological frauds; and the solemn ignorance they were inflated with was breath to her nostrils. All the “rot” they contained about ventilation, and how to go to bed, and how to get up, and what to eat, and what to drink, and how much exercise to take, and what frame of mind to keep one’s self in, and what sort of clothing to wear, was all gospel to her, and she never observed that her health-journals of the current month customarily upset everything they had recommended the month before. She was as simple-hearted and honest as the day was long, and so she was an easy victim. She gathered together her quack periodicals and her quack medicines, and thus armed with death, went about on her pale horse, in disguise, to the suffering neighbors.
And how confirmation bias reinforces their gullibility. Here’s Aunt Polly falling for Tom’s claim of ESP…
Sereny Harper shall know of this before I’m an hour older. I’d like to see her get around this with her rubbage ’bout superstition. Go on, Tom!
The bizarre epistemology that the superstitious employ…
The other boys agreed that there was reason in what Tom said, because an ignorant lump of bread, uninstructed by an incantation, could not be expected to act very intelligently when set upon an errand of such gravity.
Observations of people
There will always be people whose lenience will seem excessive of the facts…
Injun Joe was believed to have killed five citizens of the village, but what of that? If he had been Satan himself there would have been plenty of weaklings ready to scribble their names to a pardon-petition, and drip a tear on it from their permanently impaired and leaky water-works.
Careful what you wish for. On miswanting…
Huck Finn’s wealth and the fact that he was now under the Widow Douglas’ protection introduced him into society-no, dragged him into it, hurled him into it-and his sufferings were almost more than he could bear.
He had to eat with a knife and fork; he had to use napkin, cup, and plate; he had to learn his book, he had to go to church; he had to talk so properly that speech was become insipid in his mouth; whithersoever he turned, the bars and shackles of civilization shut him in and bound him hand and foot.
I got to wear them blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don’t seem to any air git through ’em, somehow; and they’re so rotten nice that I can’t set down, nor lay down, nor roll around anywher’s; I hain’t slid on a cellar-door for-well, it ‘pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and sweat-I hate them ornery sermons! I can’t ketch a fly in there, I can’t chaw. I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits up by a bell-everything’s so awful reg’lar a body can’t stand it.” “Well, everybody does that way, Huck.” “Tom, it don’t make no difference. I ain’t everybody, and I can’t stand it. It’s awful to be tied up so. And grub comes too easy-I don’t take no interest in vittles, that way. I got to ask to go a-fishing; I got to ask to go in a-swimming-dern’d if I hain’t got to ask to do everything. Well, I’d got to talk so nice it wasn’t no comfort-I’d got to go up in the attic and rip out awhile, every day, to git a taste in my mouth, or I’d a died, Tom. The widder wouldn’t let me smoke; she wouldn’t let me yell, she wouldn’t let I never see such a woman! I had to shove, Tom-I just had to. And besides, that school’s going to open, and I’d a had to go to it-well, I wouldn’t stand that , Tom. Looky-here, Tom, being rich ain’t what it’s cracked up to be. It’s just worry and worry, and sweat and sweat, and a-wishing you was dead all the time. Now these clothes suits me, and this bar’l suits me, and I ain’t ever going to shake ’em any more. Tom, I wouldn’t ever got into all this trouble if it hadn’t ‘a’ ben for that money; now you just take my sheer of it along with your’n, and gimme a ten-center sometimes-not many times, becuz I don’t give a dern for a thing ‘thout it’s tollable hard to git-and you go and beg off for me with the widder.” “Oh, Huck, you know I can’t do that. ‘Tain’t fair; and besides if you’ll try this thing just a while longer you’ll come to like it.” “Like it! Yes-the way I’d like a hot stove if I was to set on it long enough. No, Tom, I won’t be rich, and I won’t live in them cussed smothery houses. I like the woods, and the river, and hogsheads, and I’ll stick to ’em, too.
The value of time depends on your wealth…
Huck was always willing to take a hand in any enterprise that offered entertainment and required no capital, for he had a troublesome superabundance of that sort of time which is not money.
Adults and children are fundamentally different (and some humor on marriage as the end of the line)…
SO endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a boy , it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man . When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to stop-that is, with a marriage; but when he writes of juveniles, he must stop where he best can. Most of the characters that perform in this book still live, and are prosperous and happy. Some day it may seem worth while to take up the story of the younger ones again and see what sort of men and women they turned out to be; therefore it will be wisest not to reveal any of that part of their lives at present.