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Happy birthday, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain. In honour of the 176-year-anniversary of the writer’s birth, November 30th’s Google Doodle depicts one of American literature’s iconic scenes: Tom Sawyer conning his friends into whitewashing a fence for him.
PBS has the full scene, from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Tom has been assigned the whitewashing by his Aunt Polly, but, as Twain writes:
“He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit.”
Tom persuades a series of neighbourhood boys to take over the grim task for him by pretending to enjoy it:
“Oh come, now, you don’t mean to let on that you like it?” The brush continued to move.
“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”
That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped nibbling his apple. Tom swept his brush daintily back and forth – stepped back to note the effect – added a touch here and there – criticised the effect again – Ben watching every move and getting more and more interested, more and more absorbed. Presently he said:
“Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.”
So honour Mark Twain — and Tom, and other iconic characters, including Huckleberry Finn and Jim — by taking on that grim task with a little extra vigour. Maybe someone will come along and take it off your hands. Because, as Tom realizes:
“Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. 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.”