Anchita Khurana

McGee/Romano
Life on the Mississippi
Often times in life, we encounter something which delights our senses with its
wonder and beauty. It entrances us, fills our minds. However, how long will it be until
that beauty seems to fade? Many things in nature lose their sense of false beauty after
their real character or nature is revealed. We forget how to appreciate the thing, and
instead feel only drawn to the negativity and danger it may extend. Likewise, Mark
Twain in Life on the Mississippi experience great love, attachment, and attraction
towards the Mississippi River. However, he discovered that in addition to the beauty of
the river, there were also great dangers and ugliness associated with it.
Life on the Mississippi illustrates the ability of something with great beauty to be
destroyed in the minds of its onlookers. Once you start seeing that thing in a practical
way, you may no longer enjoy it. When Mark Twain saw the Mississippi through the
eyes of a sailor, he faced the dangers that the river presented. During his time as a
sailor, he learned many ways of the river. Many of the things about the river he was
once enamored with, now may pose a threat to him. He said, This sun means that we
are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small
thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill
somebodys steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those
tumbling boils show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there(73-79). The only
way he saw the river positively was in the way of how useful itd be to his job as a
steamboat pilot. Other than that, there was nothing to the river but danger. He says,
No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature
of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing
the safe piloting of a steamboat (89-92). This shows that while he was once entranced
by the river, his view now is strictly practical.
This text written by Mark Twain shows that in nature, many things which seem
wonderful at first, can actually be horribly dangerous. Not many things are what they
initially seem. Life on the Mississippi also gives us a profound message about human

nature, which can be applied to much more than one mans view of the Mississippi
River. Twain exemplifies the instability of human emotions; something which was once
enthralling can easily become boring, dull, or even despicable in the eyes of a person
over the journey of time. Nature may be deceiving, but humans are also fickle creatures.