Word: twains
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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 endless boulevards that run back and forth from the sea, offering both the allure and the illusion of eternity, which means that our rivers, like ancient sacred entities, can lead the country wherever it wishes...
...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...
Everything the river offers turns on the idea of America as Eden--an idea no less enchanting today than it was to the colonists. The country finds Eden; the country loses Eden; the country yearns for Eden. In Life on the Mississippi, Twain described his early infatuation with the river's beauty at sunset: "A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface...
...more rooted. Cairo, Ill., was a typical stop. The two-block heart of Main Street there looks like an abandoned movie set. The old brick buildings are crumbling. Only a beauty shop and a soup kitchen show any life. Once a stop on the Underground Railway for slaves (Mark Twain's Jim was hoping to head north from there), it was ripped by racial protests in the 1960s and '70s and has never fully recovered. But Main Street was recently repaved with bricks and fake trolley tracks at a cost of $1.5 million (all from federal and state grants...
Similarly, we saw a related phenomenon that could be called the Williamsburging of America. As Nancy Gibbs writes, small towns are rummaging back into their history to reassert their unique identity and attract tourists. Hannibal, Mo., has become a re-created Mark Twain birthplace. In Nauvoo, Ill., Mormons whose families lived there more than a century ago are returning to reconstruct their old temple. And the hotel owner in Kimmswick told us of the town's plan to re-enact the Civil War battle even though, he conceded, it was "just a skirmish...