Valuable Things in Our Lives
If you get a chance to choose
only one of 5 gifts, love, fame, riches, pleasure, or death, then what would
you chose? Mark Twain’s short story, “The five boons of Life,” focuses on what
is valuable in the life. The story describes the man who gets this choice.
Twain conveys the idea that what we may think is most valuable is not actually
so.
“The five boons of Life”
begins with a fairy telling a man to choose carefully from the five things. So,
the man chooses pleasure. He lives a life of pleasure but after short time he
finds it is vain and wasted. The fairy comes to him again he can chooses again.
There are 4 things without pleasure, and he chooses love. Many years later, his
love has ended and he feels grief. He fails to choose the most valuable thing
twice even though he chooses values that many people think are most valuable.
The fairy comes again, and
he chooses fame. He notices that hate and pity result fromfame. As he sits
solitarily the fairy comes again and the man chooses wealth. Three years later,
he is wearing rags. He regrets and realizes the most valuable thing is death.
The fairy comes to him, but there is no death, but only the wanton insult of
old Age. The author tells us that there is irony in the qualities that we
believe to be valuable.
The man says,“Pleasure,
love, fame, riches: they are but temporary disguises for lasting realities-
pain, grief, shame, poverty.” In the end, he draws the conclusion that the
things he chose aren’t always good.
There are many values in
life. Many people try to follow these and try to get them. This short story
gives us some questions. Are the values that we think that are best really that
good? Can we live a valuable life if we choose the values that everyone thinks are
valuable? I can’t say that death is best value and valuable. But we can learn
from this story what we think that is most valuable can be wrong. What about
you? What values do you think are really valuable?
