The Autobiography of Methuselah | Page 3

has led me to
cultivate an unconcerned aloofness from a pursuit which is ruinous to
the old and corrupting to the young.
Were the present state of literature more hopeful, perhaps I should find
pleasure in reading, but I have viewed with such increasing alarm the
growth of sensationalism in the literary output of my age that I have
felt that I owed it to my posterity, which is rapidly growing in
numbers--I believe that the latest annual report of the Society of the
Sons and Daughters of Methuselah shows a membership of six hundred
and thirty-eight thousand, without counting the new arrivals since the
end of the last fiscal year, which, at a rough guess, I should place at
thirty-six thousand--I have felt, I say, that I owe it to that posterity to

set it the example of not reading, as my most effective protest against
those pernicious influences which have made the modern literary
school a menace to civilization. Surely if Noah's children for instance,
Shem, Ham and Japhet, whom I have already had occasion to mention,
were to surprise me, their venerable, and I hope venerated ancestor,
reading such stories as are now put forth by our most successful
quarrymen--stories like that unspeakable novel "Three Decades," of
which I am credibly informed eight million tons have already been sold;
and which, let me say, when I had read only seven slabs of it I had
carted away and dumped into the Red Sea; or the innocuous but highly
frivolous tales of Miss Laura Jean Diplodocus--they would hardly
accept from me as worthy of serious attention such admonitions as I am
constantly giving them on the subject of the decadence of literature
when I find them poring over the novels of the day. Consequently even
this usual solace of old age is denied to me, and writing becomes my
refuge.
I bespeak the reader's indulgence if he or she find in the ensuing pages
any serious lapses from true literary style. I write merely as I feel, and
do not pretend to be either an expert hieroglyphist or a rhetorician of
commanding quality. Perhaps I should do more wisely if I were to
accept the advice of my great-grandson Ham, who, overhearing my
remark to a caller last Sunday evening that the work I have undertaken
is one of considerable difficulty, climbed up into my lap and in his
childish way asked me why I did not hire a boswell to do it for me. I
had to tell the child that I did not know what a boswell was, and when I
questioned him on the subject more closely, I found that it was only
one of his childish fancies. If there were such a thing as that rather
euphoniously named invention of Ham's who could relieve me of the
drudgery of writing my own life, and who would do it well, I would
cheerfully relinquish that end of my enterprise to him, but in the
absence of such a thing, I am, in spite of my manifest shortcomings,
compelled to do the work myself. On behalf of my story I can say,
however, that whatever I shall put down here will be the truth, and that
what I remember notwithstanding my advanced years, I remember
perfectly. I am quite aware that in some of the tales that I shall tell,
especially those having to do with Prehistoric Animals I have met, or

Antediluvians as I believe the Scientists call them, what I may say as to
their habits--I was going to say manners, but refrain because in all my
life I have never observed that they had any--and powers may fall upon
some ears as extravagant exaggerations. To these let me say here and
now that there are exceptions to all rules, and that if for instance, I tell
the story of a Pterodactyl that after being swallowed whole by a
Discosaurus, successfully gnaws his way through the walls of the
latter's stomach to freedom, I make no claim that all Pterodactyls could
do the same, but merely that in this particular case the Pterodactyl to
which I refer did it, and that I know that he did it because the man who
saw it is a cousin of my grandfather's first wife's step-son, and is so
wedded to truth that he is even now in jail because he would not deny a
charge of sheep-stealing, which he might easily have done were he an
untruthful man. Again when I observe that I have caught with an
ordinary fish-hook, baited with a common garden, or angle worm, on
the end of a light trout-line, a Creosaurus with a neck ninety-seven feet
long, and scales so large that you could weigh a hay-wagon on the
smallest of the lot