Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (Literary Classics (Amherst, N.Y.).)

Mark Twain's (1835-1910) witty vision of what heaven "is really like" is told from the point of view of the recently deceased Captain Stormfield. In a folksy narration peppered with sailor's jargon, the amiable, altogether down-to-earth merchant marine describes a series of amusingly disconcerting revelations about the next world. Sitting on a cloud strumming a harp all day turns out to be insufferably boring; being eternally youthful also has its drawbacks when the captain finds he has nothing in common with most youths; and the enormous dimensions of heaven completely disorient him. This funny, satirical spoof on human pretensions about the importance of our species in the grand scheme of things was the last published work by Mark Twain. Published at the beginning of the twentieth century, Twain's humorous vision of the afterlife reflects the new scientific awareness of the awesome cosmos that confronts us and the feelings of insignificance this discovery produced.