Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.

The maxim stands at the head of chapter 27 of Following the Equator, credited, like all the book’s epigraphs, to “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar”. It is paired with another in the same spirit: “The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession, what there is of it.” The chapter then opens, far from any moral, on a diary entry written at sea: a brilliant sun, an icy breeze, a long swell rolling up from the South Pole.

Pudd’nhead Wilson is the hero of Twain’s 1894 novel of that name, a lawyer laughed at by his town, who keeps a private calendar of ironic sayings. Twain revived him for this account of his lecture tour around the world, written in London after the death of his daughter Susy in 1896.

The joke works in two beats. The first sentence sounds like natural history; Darwin had called blushing “the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions”. The three-word afterthought turns it into a verdict on human conduct.

Following the Equator, Chapter 27, epigraph from Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, 1897

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