Two Views of the River

Two Views of the River, an excerpt of Life on the Mississippi written by Mark Twain, is a story written about the after effect.  What I mean by this is that when you are in the moment things, beauties and much more can seem so sureal and exciting.  Getting that new game that you wanted so bad is a perfect example.  You have been dying to play the game and you finally get the opportunity to play it and after a few days you beat the game.  The excitement is over.  You wish to have the feeling of the day that you received the game, but you can not go back to that time.  Mark Twain became a riverboat pilot.  Was it what he wanted, I do not know, but at first he loved the job.  He saw all the beauties that came with the job.  The beautiful sunset and the peaceful river made him fall in love with the job (Twain 504).  He had that experience that a little child does.  After a while things became dull for him.  He lost that feeling that he once had for the job.  He missed thinking of his job as the best thing and started seeing all the bad things that came with the job (Twain 505).  He started seeing the dangers that came along with it and could not think of what he had when he first started.  All he was now, was a pessimistic guy (Twain 505).

In Thoreau's Nature writing he expresses his feelings towards nature.  Just like in this one, where Mark Twain saw all of the good things about nature, as in the river and sunset.  Twain wanted us to learn from this by saying that you gain and lose something from every situation.  He gained and learned from the riverboating.  Thoreau expresses the same feeling in that he sees nature as a moral teacher (Grant).  Both Twain and Thoreau express the same ideas towards nature and both share many transcendentalist characteristics.

Grant, P. B. "Nature in

Walden." McClinton-Temple, Jennifer ed. Encyclopedia of Themes in

Literature

. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2011. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.

http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=&iPin=ETL1134&SingleRecord=True (accessed January

30, 2012).

Twain, Mark. "Two Views of the River." Web. 29 Feb. 2012.