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Letters From The Earth, Letter 9: Three's Company, Foresight's A Crowd! • The Devil’s Details • Episode 721

Letters From The Earth, Letter 9: Three’s Company, Foresight’s A Crowd!

Letter Nine is the shortest letter yet, and it wraps up Noah in about two pages. The Ark continues its voyage, compassless and uncontrolled, the sport of random winds and swirling currents, and the rain keeps falling at a hundred and twenty inches a day — ten feet — for forty days and forty nights, until every hill four hundred feet high is submerged and the heavens and even the angels go dry. No more water was to be had. As a universal flood, Satan says, it was a disappointment. But there had been heaps of universal floods before, as witnessed by all the Bibles of all the nations, and this was as good as the best one.

The Conversation

We dig into the two arguments Twain packs into this tiny letter. The first is that every culture on earth has a flood story, and Twain’s Satan treats them all as equally valid and equally unimpressive — Gilgamesh’s flood was fine, this one was fine, nobody’s flood was special. We work through why that might be: whether it’s the same event remembered differently, whether early civilizations were simply codifying their stories during a period when flooding was the thing most likely to kill them, or whether every creation myth eventually writes itself into a corner and needs a mechanism to explain why there are no giants or unicorns anymore. Mommy, daddy, where did they all go? The flood. Don’t look back any further than the flood.

The second argument is the one that stings. The Ark lands on Ararat, seventeen thousand feet up, the living freight disembarks, and in a single sentence Noah plants a vineyard, drinks the wine, and is overcome. This person, Satan notes, had been selected from all the populations because he was the best sample there was. He was to start the human race on a new basis. This was the new basis. The promise was bad. Now was the time to do with these people what had been so judiciously done with the others — drown them. Anybody but the Creator would have seen this. And if it’s true that God foresaw everything from the beginning of time, then he foresaw Adam and Eve eating the apple, foresaw that their posterity would have to be drowned, foresaw that Noah’s posterity would be just as unendurable, and foresaw that he’d eventually have to come down and be crucified to save the same tiresome human race again. Granting all that, the pulpit is granting that in the matter of intellect the Deity is the head pauper of the universe.

We also sit with the Noah’s-drunkenness problem, which neither of us has ever found a satisfying explanation for. If Noah wasn’t a real person, then the story isn’t a neutral record of a real man’s flaws — it’s a deliberate choice, which means it has to be teaching something. And whatever that lesson was, the culture that held it has been separated from us by enough centuries that we can’t see it anymore.

We Also Discuss

  • Three’s Company, and the realization that neither of us could correctly remember the premise of a show we both grew up with
  • Whether there’s a haunted apartment discount, a gay discount, and critically, a gay ghost discount
  • Kynan’s house, where a previous owner may have died, which produced no reduction in price whatsoever, and whose walk-in closet is reportedly larger than Lester’s bedroom
  • Corporeal form dysmorphia, and whether the afterlife adds ten pounds or six feet
  • Why Las Vegas has no basements, and what hardpan does during a flash flood
  • The Egyptians building snakes into their afterlife because snakes were the thing most likely to kill them, and English folklore building wolves into everything for the same reason
  • Twain’s line that only Roman Catholics with a priest handy to sandpaper their souls at the last gasp stand any real chance, and here and there a Presbyterian — a word Kynan still refuses to look up because the syllables are funnier unexamined

Links

The Devil is in the details. 
Join Lester Ryan Clark and Kynan Dias for a comedic deep dive into the history of the ultimate villain, tracking his journey through theology, Paradise Lost, and modern cinema.”