En Route: Tramping Beyond Innocence, Sagebrush, and Steamboats

Abstract

Drumbeaters for Mark Twain can always loosen up an audience with some of his rim-shots. Here we could stick to just his witticisms about travel, such as “I have traveled more than anyone else, and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent.”1 Such an opening might qualify for a keynote, the label proposed to me, which I have therefore pondered. It could allow the current academic maneuver of going to the Oxford English Dictionary and then playing with the meanings of a word as they evolved. But I certainly don’t aspire to strike any keynote that would teach the Twainian world to sing in perfect harmony. That goal dissatisfies me as essentially anti-Twainian, as negating the personality that we treasure and enjoy. Anyway, now we primarily associate “keynote” with those a capella solo arias on the opening night of a political convention, those calls to a grand campaign for perhaps the unattainable, and even the undesirable. More provincial than that and nevertheless bolder than Tom Sawyer, the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main, I will challenge Twainians to attract more readers for A Tramp Abroad and Following the Equator. Evidently, the reading of a book, complete in itself without links, is getting as rare as raising gooseberries, or at least as quaint as embroidering couch-pillows that revere Home, Sweet Home. Recently, the report on a campus forum about the clouded future of reading used for its sly title this question: “The End of Civilization as We Know It?” In straightforward truth, some rich minds have lately remade the case for bookishness. However, only confirmed readers are likely to see these persuasive pleadings or warnings or are likely to read attentively about reading.