What Mark Twain has to do with Me

(Warning: The following post is lengthy, and in a long-winded sort of way. In addition, it springs from several consecutive days of sleep deprivation, and has numerous obscure literary allusions, several awkwardly worded sentences, and sundry failed attempts at wit. That is all.)

Humanity is an interesting thing. In a sense, we're all connected, related, interdependent, but in a sense, most people just have nothing to do with the life of, say, Random Person A. I think that's why it's so notable when various lives do line up or intersect or in some unique way play off of one another. In fact, it's just such a person--and his unique connection to my own life--about which I'd like to say a thing or two.

The man was Samuel Clemens, best known by the pen name of Mark Twain. Born into a middle class family in a small, dank room in provincial-ville, central Mi... and I'm just kidding.

No, where our story really starts, is D----, Oklahoma, in the year 1986. That year a certain ruddy and handsome young lad began a prestigious academic career at none other than Mark Twain Kindergarten. Though beginning kindergarten several months behind the other students (because he didn't want to be separated from his momma), he overcame seemingly insurmountable odds and succeeded in continuing on to the First Grade. As a 1st grader, now at Mark Twain Elementary School, Peter (for this was the boy's name) won great recognition for himself, including First Place in the school Halloween costume contest, as a skeleton. When called into the principal's office to have his picture taken, Peter craftily used his skeleton mask to hide an overflow of tears. More Huck Finn than Tom Sawyer, Peter was crying because he mistakenly thought he was in trouble. Next, passing swiftly into second grade with all the alacrity and elan of a young man who's mastered block letters and addition with numbers from 1 to 10, Peter further distinguished himself as a son of Twain by running away from school after his gym teacher unfairly made him sit in Time Out when another kid tripped him. He also had the starring role in the 2nd grade play and was several times allowed to read his ingenious stories about Russian spies over the PA system to the entire school, including, yes, even the 6th graders.

So Twain and I were intertwined from the beginning. His namesake was my school; his pseudonym, the figurative anvil of my youth; his non de plume, the branding on my chest (on Tuesday nights, when I played soccer). How different my life had I had the misfortune of attending Will Rogers Elementary School! I shudder to think of it.

Then I moved to a new school for 3rd grade.

My next encounter with Twain came in college, when I finally got around to reading the more famous of his works. It's too soon to tell what precise lasting effects they are to have on me, but I can say that I'll certainly never think of the Mississippi the same again, nor will I ever forget the moment Tom, after winning through sheer chicanery the Sunday school prize for Bible knowledge, answered the eager clergyman's request to name two of the apostles with the cataclysmic "David and Goliath." That may have been one of the greatest moments in my life.

Most recently, I've come across several essays Twain wrote about the German language. In one he comments on the unreasonable length of German words--perfectly expressing sentiments I had while living in Austria a few years ago. In another work, he notes a key difference between German and English: That whereas in English we are always trying to think of new ways to refer to the same thing, in German it's perfectly all right to reuse the same word endlessly. So for example, if I, an English-speaker, want to write a story about a man with a knife, I have to do something like this, "The knife's shadow crept slowly down the alleyway. As Mickey peered down into the passage below, he noticed a small light moving and flickering there below--the dagger's tip. Losing sight of the faint luminescence, Mickey leaned out of the window, calling out, 'Hello, down there! Hello!' As though suspended in air, the thick, serrated edge trudged slowly, silently up the firewell beside the window. As Mickey craned farther out of the window, shouting again, the cold blade rose slowly into the air."
So you see what's happened? In addition to forcing me to write a silly story in a genre that's not exactly my forte, this language-wide aversion to repetition also made me use "dagger" (hardly accurate), "thick, serrated edge" (rather melodramatic), and "cold blade" instead of just saying "knife" each time. An odd story here and there may indeed find itself bolstered to have half a million synonyms flying around inside it, but more often than not, it's just simply a pain. I can't tell you how many times in my own experience a short story has come to a jolting stop in mid-composition for no other reason than a simple scarcity of synonyms.

But my favorite quote of Twain's, the quip that really takes the cake, the sayonara hit in any debate over the intertwinedness of Twain and me, was this comment following his travels to France: "I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language."

I'll just let you try to imagine how that comment might apply to me.