If he were still alive, Mark Twain would be 186 years old today. Shania Twain is, happily, still with us. In fact, she was born at almost the exact midpoint between Mark Twain’s death in 1910 and today:
So the author of “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn” &c has been dead twice as long as the singer of “Forever and For Always” and “You’re Still the One” etc. has been alive.
Are the two related? Of course they are; we all are. All of us are cousins of some ordinal degree and at some remove. But do they have a common ancestor surnamed Twain? No. Neither one was born with that name. “Mark Twain” was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens; “Shania Twain” was born Eilleen Regina Edwards (Twain was her stepfather’s surname).
I am a big fan of both of them: The author for almost sixty years now (practically my whole life), the singer for about sixty hours, from when I stumbled across the first-mentioned song above while listening to my usual mix of Classical (Bach, Pachelbel), Reggae (Boney M., UB40), Country Rock (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Ozark Mountain Daredevils), Rock, and Pop on YouTube (I haven’t listened to the radio in decades, so this was the first time I heard the 2003 song).
But getting back to the timeline. Personalize it. Which year would you land on if you traveled backward in time from your birth year for as many years as you’ve been alive? In other words, taking Shania Twain as an example, if she could unwind time from her birth for the fifty-six years she’s been alive, she would land in 1909. For me, traveling back my sixty-three years would put me in 1895, the year Mark Twain embarked on his ‘round-the-world speaking tour to pay off debts his failed publishing business and didn’t-pan-out investments saddled him with.
Meditating on events from the opposite end of your timeline can make you feel ancient and cobwebby. In other words, calculating that the time from Twain’s “Following the Equator” tour to my birth is the same as the time that has passed from my birth until now can make me feel downright antiquish. On the other hand, it can bring home to me that those events from “the olden days” weren’t really as long ago as I imagined them to be. I say this because my earliest memories don’t seem that far in the past to me. Thus, when I was born, those who were old enough at the time to remember Twain’s tour didn’t view it as being all that far back in the past, either.
In the stream of time, those three score of years plus a few are just a bob, float, and a drift.
Try it. Do the math. It can be interesting to calculate where you would be if time ran backward instead of forward. For example:
In 1982, when my wife and I got married, my birth year of 1958 was midway between that year and 1934, the year of my father’s birth.
In 1990, when my second son was born, my “back to the future” year was 1926, the midst of the “Roaring 20s.”
2006 was the year when I had been alive the same number of years (48) as Twain had been dead at the time of my birth. It made the time between his death and my birth seem less lengthy than it had otherwise seemed—in the “grand scheme of things,” we are practically contemporaries.
Plot it out. Your birth year is the midpoint between now and what year in the past? As Michael Pinder of the Moody Blues put it, “Thinking is the Best Way to Travel.”