Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Part 1
1897
Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Part 1
1897
Mark Twain's account of his lecture tour around the world reads like a man who lost his fortune and found his voice. Forced to travel and speak his way back to solvency after a disastrous investment, Twain transforms his journey into a savagely funny chronicle of late-Victorian travel. From the chaos of his departure through the endless Pacific crossing, his eye catches everything absurd: the absurd length of Australian place-names, the peculiar dignity of colonial officials, the strange customs of lands that seem impossibly distant. He offers sharp commentary on the Boer War, reflects on the Sepoy Mutiny's aftermath, and marvels at New Zealand's radical experiment with women's suffrage. The characters aboard his ship become a parade of human folly, observed with that particular Twainian mix of affection and contempt. This is travel writing as performance, as social critique, as the memoir of a man discovering that disaster might be the best原料 for understanding the world. It remains a vivid time capsule and a demonstration that even in failure, Twain could find material.
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“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.””
— Mark Twain
“There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.””
— Mark Twain
“In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.””
— Mark Twain
“Be good and you will be lonesome.””
— Mark Twain
“He had had much experience of physicians, and said 'the only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd druther not'.””
— Mark Twain
“The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done - these are traits of the human race at large.””
— Mark Twain
“Names are not always what they seem.””
— Mark Twain
“Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.””
— Mark Twain
“I find that, as a rule, when a thing is a wonder to us it is not because of what we see in it, but because of what others have seen in it. We get almost all our wonders at second hand.””
— Mark Twain
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Twain, Mark. Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Part 1. Lex, lex-books.com/book/following-the-equator-a-journey-around-the-world-part-1-2a36b78a-3275-461a-8bb4-35aa26a37808.Twain, M. (1897). Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Part 1. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/following-the-equator-a-journey-around-the-world-part-1-2a36b78a-3275-461a-8bb4-35aa26a37808Twain, Mark. Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Part 1. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/following-the-equator-a-journey-around-the-world-part-1-2a36b78a-3275-461a-8bb4-35aa26a37808.
