Happy New Year from Hati and Skoll Gallery

Mark_Twain_and_Dorothy_Quick
Figure 1 – Mark Twain with Dorothy Quick c. 1907. From the Wikicommons in the public domain.

Call me crazy, but I am optimistic about 2013.  We all need to be optimistic.  Despite all the terrible events that are happening, we all need to imagine and to dream of a better world.  We all need to work together to make it better.

I have been looking for an excuse to insert a photograph of Mark Twain (1835-1910) into my blog.  So here it is.  I have chosen an image of Twain taken around 1907, with eleven year old Dorothy Quick (1896-1962) – an unlikely friendship?  Dorothy spotted and recognized Twain on a transatlantic crossing.  She slowly circled his chair multiple times, until he introduced himself.  They went on to be great friends until Twain’s death in 1910.  Ms. Quick went on to become a writer herself.

In his darkest moments, Mark Twain wrote one of his finest works, “The Mysterious Stranger.”  Here he revealed his worst pessimism, his most dreaded thoughts.  It is an awesome existential work, which ends in the vision that everything in the world is nothing but a dream.  We are the dreamers.  We have chosen to have bad dreams and nightmares. Twain challenges us to “Dream other dreams, and better!”  It is an admonition worth restating on January 1, 2013. Let’s work together to dream better dreams.

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