Life on the Mississippi

Life on the Mississippi – Mark Twain

From Ruffian Dick, another inspiration — Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. With accolades like “Great American Classic,” and understanding that it was travel literature, or the American Frontier, when that started in St. Louis.

Weird, to me.

A particular passage in Burton’s text, set on the deck of a river boat, a sailor at the bow calling the sounding line, “Mark, Twain, Mark Twain, Mark…” triggered me to look at Life on the Mississippi a second time.

I think it’s Huck Finn that I’ve reread a half-dozen times, a timeless American classic, in its own right.

Always a tad irreverent —

“In fact, all around, religion was in a peculiarly blooming condition: the Council of Trent was being called; the Spanish Inquisition was roasting, and racking, and burning, with a free hand; elsewhere on the continent the nations were being persuaded to holy living by the sword and fire; in England, Henry VIII. had suppressed the monasteries, burnt Fisher and another bishop or two, and was getting his English reformation and his harem effectively started.” Page 33.

Always a tad irreverent —

Whether it was observation, or the way the material was presented, or the juxtaposition of elements, Twain always had that humorist’s eye and ear.