Roughing It

Good book by Mark Twain. I love his wit and he was so ahead of his time in thinking! IMO. :)

I've started rereading this book for about the third or fourth time. I think I'll post some observations in the days to come.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. I've been trying to read some more Twain. And this title is among those that I'm thinkin' about adding to my summer que.

In just a few days, I'm almost through. But I've been taking notes, same as before.

This book is just like his journey, with stops along the way to draw in some scenery, some to take your breath away; some - most - to just relieve the commonplace with humor. It's all in the journey. The stops make it worth remembering. The best places are the character sketches. There are about six or seven chapters that draw your attention because they're a story in themselves. For example, Captain Ned Blakely (ch L).

This time around I acknowledge some padding. Some chapters or sections could have been omitted without overall damage. If it were up to me, I would excise entire portions inserted by Twain that were written by others.

But there are pockets of gold sprinkled here and there. Just keep your pan open.

". . . the spinning ground and waltzing trees appeared to give us a mute hurrah as we went by, and then slack up and then look after us as with interest or envy or something."

"At that place the upper third of one or two majestic purple domes projected above our level on either hand and gave us a sense of a hidden great deep of mountains and plains and valleys down about their bases which we fancied we might see if we could step to the edge and look over. These Sultans of the fastnesses were turbaned with tumbled volumes of cloud, which shredded away from time to time and drifted off fringed and torn, trailing their continents of shadow after them; and catching presently on an intercepting peak, wrapped it about and brooded there-- then shredded away again and left the purple peak, as they had left the purple domes, downy and white with new-laid snow."

More to come!

Done! Took less than a week, but a day or two longer than I anticipated.

More descriptive passages:

"While the hush yet brooded, the messengers of the coming resurrection appeared in the East. A growing warmth suffused the horizon, and soon the sun emerged and looked out over the cloud-waste, flinging bars of ruddy light across it, staining its folds and billow-caps with blushes, purpling the shaded troughs between, and glorifying the massy vapor- palaces and cathedrals with a wasteful splendor of all blendings and combinations of rich coloring." (LXXVI)

short quotes:

"The place below looked like the infernal regions and these men like half-cooled devils just come up on a furlough." - view inside a crater in Hawaii

"Imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled network of angry fire!"

And a soupcon of sarcasm. I wouldn't take this as a swipe at women in general. It's just funny:

In those days woman was rigidly taught to "know her place." Her place was to do all the work, take all the cuffs, provide all the food, and content herself with what was left after her lord had finished his dinner . . . These poor ignorant heathen seem to have had a sort of groping idea of what came of woman eating fruit in the garden of Eden, and they did not choose to take any more chances.

And, finally, a swipe at Calvinism:

Near by is an interesting ruin - the meagre remains of an ancient heathen temple - a place where human sacrifices were offered up in those old bygone days when the simple child of nature, yielding momentarily to sin when sorely tempted, acknowledged his error when calm reflection had shown it him, and came forward with noble frankness and offered up his grandmother as an atoning sacrifice - in those old days when the luckless sinner could keep on cleansing his conscience and achieving periodical happiness as long as his relations held out; long, long before the missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make them permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there; and showed the poor native how dreary a place perdition is and what unnecessarily liberal facilities there are for going to it; showed him how, in his ignorance he had gone and fooled away all his kinfolks to no purpose; showed him what rapture it is to work all day long for fifty cents to buy food for next day with, as compared with fishing for pastime and lolling in the shade through eternal Summer, and eating of the bounty that nobody labored to provide but Nature. How sad it is to think of the multitudes who have gone to their graves in this beautiful island and never knew there was a hell!

One passage that escaped my notice the first time I read it comes from chapter XLVIII:

The first twenty-six graves in the Virginia cemetery were occupied by murdered men. So everybody said, so everybody believed, and so they will always say and believe. The reason why there was so much slaughtering done, was, that in a new mining district the rough element predominates, and a person is not respected until he has "killed his man." That was the very expression used.

If an unknown individual arrived, they did not inquire if he was capable, honest, industrious, but--had he killed his man? If he had not, he gravitated to his natural and proper position, that of a man of small consequence; if he had, the cordiality of his reception was graduated according to the number of his dead. It was tedious work struggling up to a position of influence with bloodless hands; but when a man came with the blood of half a dozen men on his soul, his worth was recognized at once and his acquaintance sought.

The parallels of lawlessness in Twain's Nevada and today are eery. We have a subculture of hoodlums celebrated in "song" (rap) and gangsta attire. If some knuckle-dragging, shaved-head cretin isn't an actual murderer, he knows there's money to be made by posing as one in one of those headache-inducing idiotic ghetto productions.

And if he's particularly good at it, he can even wangle an award of some kind. Homosexual-bashing, misogynistic, racist - all your customary modern betes-noire - don't matter. What matters is that your message is REAL!. It's got street cred! To this day that pus-bucket known as Eminem garners recognition that reveals more about the critics than the perpetrator.

Thanks for posting your reflections. I'm stacking up a Twain pile right now, and about about ready to start on A Connecticut Yankee. . . . .with this one close on the concluding pages of the latter.