525,600 Minutes: How I Ended Up Taking My Life in My Hands, Part II

At night time, however, it is another story. That’s because at night time, I have to go to bed with Mark. Mark Twain, that is. What I thought was going to be a fun romp with Huck and Tom has turned into a trip around the world with one of the most snooty, condescending people I have ever met. Yes, that’s Mark Twain. 

I have kicked off The Unabridged Mark Twain, Part 1 (of three volumes, each more than a thousand pages of little, tiny words) with The Innocents Abroad, a truly torturous work of non-fiction. In it Mark recounts in excruciating detail his luxurious ocean-liner trip. He calls poor Portuguese villagers vermin. He says all women in France are fat and ugly and have pug noses, and that women in Morocco are wise for covering their atrocious faces. He flaunts his money and says crass and cruel things about those without it. He is traveling with others accustomed to being privileged and together they all think nothing of imposing their expectations for first-class treatment on everyone they meet. 

I am disgusted and bored. And yet I read on, for two reasons. One, every few pages, in the midst of all his tedious details, he writes something so good that I find myself literally stopping and gasping. For instance, he writes about how his ship comes upon another ship flying an American flag and writes:

“Many a one on our decks knew then for the first time how tame a sight his country’s flag is at home compared to what it is in a foreign land.” 

It is an image that stays with me for days. I think of how moved winning athletes always are when their flag is unfurled at the Olympics, or how the astronauts must have felt to place that first flag on the moon, or even how glued I was to each baseball game’s singing of the National Anthem, right here at home, right after 9/11.

In another chapter, he writes about keeping a journal, how the enthusiasm one has at the beginning can never be maintained throughout—what starts as a pleasure becomes a bore. He writes: