Years ago Mark Twain said man is the only animal who has taken a thousand useless luxuries, turned them all into necessities and replaced a good night’s rest with a medicated sleep that does not refresh.

Pretty prescient, isn’t it. Especially when you consider that Twain was speaking about life more than a century ago.

He was contemplating days at the turn of the 20th Century before the invention of the mass-produced automobile, the airplane, radio, television and — heaven knows — the computer. They’re all “necessities” now, and we’ve recently had a bit of a reminder about how life would be without some of them — the ones that depend upon electricity.

Like another 30,000 or so families in the area, mine spent a trio of January days without that flow of electrons upon which we all depend. For us, it’s not as rare an occasion as it might be for others. In our neighborhood the power tends to go off when a dog sniffs a utility pole or an ambling teen-ager sneezes in the direction of a transformer.

But when that happens, the power usually doesn’t stay off for days as it did a couple of weeks ago. Most often the lights go out, epithets are mumbled, a few hours pass, devices suddenly spring to life again and it’s time to re-set the clocks. A few years ago we’d experienced a lengthy outage, and thanks to a neighbor — who always seems to have power when we do not — we ran a small ceramic heater in the family room where we “camped” for the better part of four days. Mom, dad, young son, younger daughter and a then-one-year-old Irish setter.

It was not a fun time.

The recent interruption to daily life was made a bit more bearable because Mom had the foresight to anticipate a lengthy outage — and a cold spell — and purchased a gasoline-powered generator. So it was three days in the family room with a ceramic heater, mom, dad, college-graduate son, college-student daughter, a nine-year-old Irish setter, three-year-old Labrador mix, an ill-tempered cat and, wonder of it all, a working television.

Inconvenient, sure, but hardly unendurable.

On the first night without electricity — pre-generator — Dad spent the night in his upstairs bedroom huddled under layers of blankets, wearing sweat pants and a sweatshirt, stocking hat and gloves. And still he shivered.

He also came to the conclusion in the middle of the night that he would not have made a very good pioneer.

In fact, a couple of nights spent in a 40-degree house are nowhere near a hardship, especially when you compare that to what people must have endured on the Kentucky frontier 200 years ago.

The people who brought Catholicism to Kentucky came to the state from Maryland on horseback or eventually on wagons when they could find enough “buffalo trace” pathways to make the wagons usable. Mostly, they walked. And when they arrived here they had to build their own homes — cabins constructed next to sources of water, made from logs they had to chop down, drag, carve and fit together with a tacky mud strengthened, if you can call it that, with straw or dead grass.

They hunted and grew their own food, chopped their own firewood and protected themselves from Native Americans or outlaws. And they built with their own hands the foundation of what became the Archdiocese of Louisville.

How they did it is almost beyond comprehension. How Stephen Badin — the first priest to be ordained in the U.S. and just 26 when he arrived in Kentucky in 1793 — spread his faith and survived the destitution, disease and desolation is a wonder. How Benedict Joseph Flaget — called “the first Bishop of the West” by Father Clyde Crews and other historians — advanced the spread of Catholicism from horseback as the first bishop of the diocese is something miraculous.

And it’s something to think about during this bicentennial year for the archdiocese. It’s something to think about the next time the conveniences we take for granted are interrupted again — as they surely will be.

Here’s something else to consider. The next time you can’t get heat from your furnace or cool air from your air conditioner, the next time you can’t watch a ball game or get the History Channel on your satellite receiver, remember there are several hundred people right here in this community who live outside, in the cold or the heat, all the time.

There are homeless people right here and millions more like them across the world on the plains of Darfur, in the teeming cities of East Asia and elsewhere. We talk about being without electricity for a day or two in florid terms and expansive adjectives.

But our hyperbole is their reality, and that’s something we should all remember.