Word: huck
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...bicycle too for the skinny inlets and alleys along the way, and a lot of time and patience. We could at best splash in it a little, to see what it felt like, and what we might learn--and unlearn--by stopping along the way. It was worth remembering Huck Finn's lesson: the river is the sanctuary; the shore is where you get into trouble...
Ever since the Jordan, people have used rivers to find something (Jim and Huck's escape) or someone (Conrad's Kurtz or Coppola's). But in America rivers have meant more than quests and more than entrances and borders. They have been tests of what the country wanted of its wilderness and of itself--reminders of the beckoning wilderness of the American mind. Water seems always to be where the great national story unfolds--Melville's ocean, Dreiser's lake, Fitzgerald's bay. But as Twain suggested, nothing was ever as deep as the river. The Atlantic becomes transformed into...
...wonder so many American artists have written, sung, painted and even gone round the bend, gone mad, in the name of rivers. In his overboard essay on Huck and Jim, Leslie Fiedler wrote that the river supports "the American dream of isolation afloat." Out of that isolation in motion comes every inspiration, from contemplation (Langston Hughes' "The Negro Speaks of Rivers") to adventure (Hemingway's stories) to despair. The poet John Berryman looked down into the Mississippi and jumped to his death. The river is expanse, but it is also loneliness; Huck finds a loving relationship with...
Twain placed Huck and Jim on the river because the river was time, motion, beauty, baptism and violence, but mainly because one could not see around the bend. Civilizations are formed by bends in the river--the Nile, Congo, Thames, Yangtze--a twist of the land, water and fate that, by making it impossible to see what comes next, raises hopes of the possibility of everything...
...wants to be a millionaire? In the song the answer was, "I don't." But that was in another country. Gone these days is the character who practically defined American heroism, epic and tragic--Huck and Holden; Charlie Chaplin, Charlie Brown. Nearly all of Hemingway's heroes are defeated in Winner Take Nothing and in the novels. In To Have and Have Not, Harry Morgan had not. The dark, antiheroes of a time as recent as the 1970s have disappeared too--De Niro in Taxi Driver, Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon. Bruce Springsteen sang about his "town full of losers...