Thoughts on Mark Twain

Bicycling certainly keeps me keenly in touch with the rising and setting of the sun, the length of days, and the weather, but regular reports on the weather days after the fact aren't much use unless they're from a writer as clever as Mark Twain.  I happened upon the previous quote from Twain while looking for a good read to curl up with after coming home from work on a stormy evening.  The passage gave me an excuse to skip the weather report, and also brought back some strange but fond memories.

For Christmas one year my parents gave me copies of the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.  I was a little young for them, only about seven years old, not long past the school primer adventures of Dick, Jane and Sally, and accustomed to simple, direct, declarative sentences.  For the first few pages of Huck Finn I struggled with the ungrammatical dialect, reading where I'd dropped on my knees and elbows on a pile of clothes, toys and gift wrappings on my bedroom floor.  It was the first time I'd read a first-person, present-tense story written in the character's own voice, and I was amazed.  I must have been reading out loud, because I remember looking up at my parents peeking in my bedroom door.  "But this is REAL.  This is a REAL BOY talking to me in my head RIGHT NOW," I gabbled.  Then I had to get right back to reading the book, because that boy and his whole world disappeared from my head when I stopped reading.

After that I loved reading, and started saying I was going to be a writer when I grew up. Inevitably, I grew up to be an English major, but I've always been more of a reader than a writer.  All through school no one ever told me I was really a very clumsy and dull writer.  I had lots of ideas, but struggled to organize them into words and sentences; I would get impatient with the mechanics of getting words in order, and forget what I was trying to say.

Mark Twain was a writer who could handle his words.  Of the two candidates for Great American Novelist from my school English classes, F. Scott Fitzgerald was the verbal writer, while Ernest Hemingway was the visual one.  This is something that occurred to me after I'd been blogging for a little while:  when I want to show the odd and lovely places my bicycle takes me, my first impulse is to just paste in a big, colorful, digital Polaroid shot.  Turns out I'm a visual thinker, not a verbal one, and writing doesn't come naturally to me, no matter how strongly reading grabs my imagination.  Maybe I need to re-learn to write like Hemingway did.