Why have I avoided reading Mark Twain? He wrote several books about travel that should appeal to a traveler like me. Perhaps it was because he was on the approved reading list put out by American public school marms -- you know, like "Wuthering Heights," and the like.
But in reading "Roughing It," another factor became clearer and clearer: Twain was popular because he was considered humorous. And the brutal fact is, that humor does not age well.
In fact I was losing motivation a third of the way through the book. But just then...
He was describing the stagecoach trip west of Salt Lake City.
Are we then to conclude that beauty of the 'positive' (as with humor) is short-lived, while the 'negative' is immortal? Self-help gurus, popular tele-evangelists, and pop psychologists (who host daytime television talk shows) would hate this conclusion.
Perhaps there is a third choice: to stop conflating 'the positive' with the sugary, the innocuous, with cheerleading boosterism, or with vacant contentment.
And instead, we could give a writer credit for being positive for honesty and the courage to go after the fundamental conundrums of the human condition, regardless of how many cookies or soda pops he could sell.
But in reading "Roughing It," another factor became clearer and clearer: Twain was popular because he was considered humorous. And the brutal fact is, that humor does not age well.
In fact I was losing motivation a third of the way through the book. But just then...
He was describing the stagecoach trip west of Salt Lake City.
but now we were to cross a desert in daylight. This was fine— novel— romantic— dramatically adventurous— this, indeed, was worth living for, worth traveling for! We would write home all about it.
This enthusiasm, this stern thirst for adventure, wilted under the sultry August sun and did not last above one hour. One poor little hour— and then we were ashamed thatwe had “gushed” so. The poetry was all in the anticipation— there is none in the reality. Imagine a vast, waveless ocean stricken dead and turned to ashes; imagine this solemn waste tufted with ash-dusted sage-bushes; imagine the lifeless silence and solitude that belong to such a place; imagine a coach, creeping like a bug through the midst of this shoreless level, and sending up tumbled volumes of dust as if it were a bug that went by steam; imagine this aching monotony of toiling and plowing kept up hour after hour, and the shore still as far away as ever, apparently; imagine team, driver, coach and passengers so deeply coated with ashes that they are all one colorless color; imagine ash-drifts roosting above moustaches and eyebrows like snow accumulations on boughs and bushes. This is the reality of it.
The sun beats down with dead, blistering, relentless malignity; the perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but scarcely a sign of it finds its way to the surface— it is absorbed before it gets there; there is not the faintest breath of air stirring; there is not a merciful shred of cloud in all the brilliant firmament; there is not a...What glorious, brutal, honest prose! But he was writing about something "negative," by the standards of the tourist industry or modern pop psychology.
Are we then to conclude that beauty of the 'positive' (as with humor) is short-lived, while the 'negative' is immortal? Self-help gurus, popular tele-evangelists, and pop psychologists (who host daytime television talk shows) would hate this conclusion.
Perhaps there is a third choice: to stop conflating 'the positive' with the sugary, the innocuous, with cheerleading boosterism, or with vacant contentment.
And instead, we could give a writer credit for being positive for honesty and the courage to go after the fundamental conundrums of the human condition, regardless of how many cookies or soda pops he could sell.
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