I’m gradually learning that Mark Twain is not exactly my cup of tea, but I have to say, this was a fun book.
Most time-travelers try to pretend they fit in and generally avoid introducing anachronisms. Either they’re just there as spectators to soak it all in on the reader’s behalf, or they’re caught up helplessly in large-scale historical events and are simply trying survive while attempting to return to the time and place where they belong—or, likely, both. But not the guy in this book! He remakes the whole world in his own image. And you know what? More power to him. The past is a terrible place.
Soon, I’ll read Ivanhoe and see how Walter Scott depicts Medieval England. Some Googling indicates that it’s not wholly accurate (though it has many accurate details), and that it romanticizes the past, but that not everything is shown in a positive light.
See below for some quotes I pulled out of Connecticut Yankee that I found amusing or insightful (or both).
Quotes
The time travel in this novel, if it really was that, begins with a head injury received “during a misunderstanding conducted with crowbars.”
The narrator, when he encountered someone who said he was a “page,” replied: “you ain’t more than a paragraph.”
“[A]ll of a sudden I stumbled on the very thing, just by luck. I knew that the only total eclipse of the sun in the first half of the sixth century occurred on the 21st of June, A.D. 528, O.S., and began at 3 minutes after 12 noon. I also knew that no total eclipse of the sun was due in what to me was the present year—i.e., 1879. So, if I could keep my anxiety and curiosity from eating the heart out of me for forty-eight hours, I should then find out for certain whether this boy was telling me the truth or not.” Another convenient eclipse! But unlike in King Solomon’s Mines, where the characters physically carried an almanac, this guy apparently has almanac data stored away in his head…
“I had seen a couple of boys, strangers, meet by chance, and say simultaneously, ‘I can lick you,’ and go at it on the spot; but I had always imagined until now that that sort of thing belonged to children only, and was a sign and mark of childhood.” But this is what the knights go around doing, even though they are grown adults. The narrator has feelings of condescension towards the people he encounters, because they behave childishly.
“There did not seem to be brains enough in the entire nursery, so to speak, to bait a fish-hook with; but you didn’t seem to mind that, after a little, because you soon saw that brains were not needed in a society like that, and indeed would have marred it, hindered it, spoiled its symmetry—perhaps rendered its existence impossible.”
“As for conveniences, properly speaking, there weren’t any. I mean little conveniences; it is the little conveniences that make the real comfort of life. The big oaken chairs, graced with rude carvings, were well enough, but that was the stopping place. There was no soap, no matches, no looking-glass—except a metal one, about as powerful as a pail of water.”
“There was no gas, there were no candles; a bronze dish half full of boarding-house butter with a blazing rag floating in it was the thing that produced what was regarded as light. A lot of these hung along the walls and modified the dark, just toned it down enough to make it dismal. If you went out at night, your servants carried torches. There were no books, pens, paper or ink, and no glass in the openings they believed to be windows. It is a little thing—glass is—until it is absent, then it becomes a big thing. But perhaps the worst of all was, that there wasn’t any sugar, coffee, tea, or tobacco. I saw that I was just another Robinson Crusoe cast away on an uninhabited island, with no society but some more or less tame animals, and if I wanted to make life bearable I must do as he did—invent, contrive, create, reorganize things; set brain and hand to work, and keep them busy. Well, that was in my line.”
“[T]here was one thing I couldn’t understand—nobody had asked for an autograph. I spoke to Clarence about it. By George! I had to explain to him what it was. Then he said nobody in the country could read or write but a few dozen priests. Land! think of that.” I think about this a lot, especially when someone talks about how much better education was in the good old days. I’m not sure which good old days they’re talking about, and maybe they aren’t either, but widespread literacy is a modern phenomenon, not a given.
“Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and examine. I had mine, the king and his people had theirs. In both cases they flowed in ruts worn deep by time and habit, and the man who should have proposed to divert them by reason and argument would have had a long contract on his hands. For instance, those people had inherited the idea that all men without title and a long pedigree, whether they had great natural gifts and acquirements or hadn’t, were creatures of no more consideration than so many animals, bugs, insects; whereas I had inherited the idea that human daws who can consent to masquerade in the peacock-shams of inherited dignities and unearned titles, are of no good but to be laughed at.” I think a ‘daw’ is a kind of bird, like a jackdaw, related to the crow.
“But as a perishable perfect man must die, and leave his despotism in the hands of an imperfect successor, an earthly despotism is not merely a bad form of government, it is the worst form that is possible.”
“‘The truth is, Alisande, these archaics are a little too simple; the vocabulary is too limited, and so, by consequence, descriptions suffer in the matter of variety; they run too much to level Saharas of fact, and not enough to picturesque detail; this throws about them a certain air of the monotonous; in fact the fights are all alike: a couple of people come together with great random—random is a good word, and so is exegesis, for that matter, and so is holocaust, and defalcation, and usufruct and a hundred others, but land! a body ought to discriminate—they come together with great random, and a spear is brast, and one party brake his shield and the other one goes down, horse and man, over his horse-tail and brake his neck, and then the next candidate comes randoming in, and brast his spear, and the other man brast his shield, and down he goes, horse and man, over his horse-tail, and brake his neck, and then there’s another elected, and another and another and still another, till the material is all used up; and when you come to figure up results, you can’t tell one fight from another, nor who whipped; and as a picture, of living, raging, roaring battle, sho! why, it’s pale and noiseless—just ghosts scuffling in a fog.'”
“My missionaries were taught to spell out the gilt signs on their tabards—the showy gilding was a neat idea, I could have got the king to wear a bulletin-board for the sake of that barbaric splendor—they were to spell out these signs and then explain to the lords and ladies what soap was; and if the lords and ladies were afraid of it, get them to try it on a dog. The missionary’s next move was to get the family together and try it on himself; he was to stop at no experiment, however desperate, that could convince the nobility that soap was harmless; if any final doubt remained, he must catch a hermit—the woods were full of them; saints they called themselves, and saints they were believed to be. They were unspeakably holy, and worked miracles, and everybody stood in awe of them. If a hermit could survive a wash, and that failed to convince a duke, give him up, let him alone. Whenever my missionaries overcame a knight errant on the road they washed him, and when he got well they swore him to go and get a bulletin-board and disseminate soap and civilization the rest of his days. As a consequence the workers in the field were increasing by degrees, and the reform was steadily spreading.”
“‘Kings’ and ‘Kingdoms’ were as thick in Britain as they had been in little Palestine in Joshua’s time, when people had to sleep with their knees pulled up because they couldn’t stretch out without a passport.” Most modern countries, if not all of them, are conglomerations of smaller historical domains. Nations are just a stack of little tribes or city-states in a trench-coat. The world was bigger when it was harder to travel, and kingdoms were smaller.
“We have brains, you and I; and for such as have brains there are no defeats, but only victories.”
“We must have a religion—it goes without saying—but my idea is, to have it cut up into forty free sects, so that they will police each other…. [A]n Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition.” The combination of religion and state power is dangerous.
“If I had the remaking of man, he wouldn’t have any conscience. It is one of the most disagreeable things connected with a person; and although it certainly does a great deal of good, it cannot be said to pay, in the long run; it would be much better to have less good and more comfort.” Strangely enough, I think only a person who listens to his conscience can conclude this.
“[W]e prize anything that is ours.” In psychology, this principle is known as the endowment effect.
“[The old king] was but an extinct volcano; he had been active in his time, but his fire was out, this good while, he was only a stately ash-pile now.”
“[W]hen you are expecting the worst, you get something that is not so bad, after all.”
“[N]o people in the world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed must begin in blood, whatever may answer afterward. If history teaches anything, it teaches that.”
“You can’t reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.”
“‘There, never mind, let it go; you make me tired. You can’t seem to understand the simplest thing.’ ‘I would I might please thee, sir, and it is to me dole and sorrow that I fail, albeit sith I am but a simple damsel and taught of none, being from the cradle unbaptized in those deep waters of learning that do anoint with a sovereignty him that partaketh of that most noble sacrament, investing him with reverend state to the mental eye of the humble mortal who, by bar and lack of that great consecration seeth in his own unlearned estate but a symbol of that other sort of lack and loss which men do publish to the pitying eye with sackcloth trappings whereon the ashes of grief do lie bepowdered and bestrewn, and so, when such shall in the darkness of his mind encounter these golden phrases of high mystery, these shut-up-shops, and draw-the-game, and bank-the-fires, it is but by the grace of God that he burst not for envy of the mind that can beget, and tongue that can deliver so great and mellow-sounding miracles of speech, and if there do ensue confusion in that humbler mind, and failure to divine the meanings of these wonders, then if so be this miscomprehension is not vain but sooth and true, wit ye well it is the very substance of worshipful dear homage and may not lightly be misprized, nor had been, an ye had noted this complexion of mood and mind and understood that that I would I could not, and that I could not I might not, nor yet nor might nor could, nor might-not nor could-not, might be by advantage turned to the desired would, and so I pray you mercy of my fault, and that ye will of your kindness and your charity forgive it, good my master and most dear lord.’ I couldn’t make it all out—that is, the details—but I got the general idea; and enough of it, too, to be ashamed. It was not fair to spring those nineteenth century technicalities upon the untutored infant of the sixth and then rail at her because she couldn’t get their drift; and when she was making the honest best drive at it she could, too, and no fault of hers that she couldn’t fetch the home plate; and so I apologized. Then we meandered pleasantly away toward the hermit holes in sociable converse together, and better friends than ever.” The protagonist is trying to talk to his female companion, Sandy, and learns that when communicating with someone, you have to meet them halfway.
“Words realize nothing, vivify nothing to you, unless you have suffered in your own person the thing which the words try to describe. There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and complacently about ‘the working classes,’ and satisfy themselves that a day’s hard intellectual work is very much harder than a day’s hard manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much bigger pay. Why, they really think that, you know, because they know all about the one, but haven’t tried the other. But I know all about both; and so far as I am concerned, there isn’t money enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pickaxe thirty days, but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as near nothing as you can cipher it down—and I will be satisfied, too. Intellectual ‘work’ is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the musician with the fiddle-bow in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him—why, certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it’s a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair—but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, also.” I don’t agree with all of this, but I am glad I am an urban office worker and don’t have to swing a pickaxe.
When and Why I Read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Time to read some Mark Twain.
Genre: American literature
Date started / date finished: 23-Mar-25 to 29-Mar-25
Length: 462 pages
ISBN: B0756Z7ZNY
Originally published in: 1889/2017
Amazon link: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
