It’s All Just Stories Anyway

What we remember, what we forget, what we make up, what we think we want and know.

There are more than a few warm and touching moments in the Ken Burns Mark Twain documentary. One of the most memorable, for me anyway, is when Twain, nearing the end of his life, takes the train back to Hannibal, Missouri. He is greeted by the town that loved him like no other son it ever had, or has had since. Folks dressed up like Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher to greet him at the train station, he was treated like royalty at the Labinnah Club (“Hannibal” spelled backwards) where he made a tearful speech. Setting this moment up beautifully, writer, historian, and Twain scholar Ron Powers muses to Burns’s Florentine Films camera, “When you become…unsure… of who you are now; you go to who you were when you knew who you were. And try to… read back out of that.”

Twain proves you can go home again. But should you?

I don’t have to travel by train to my boyhood home; it is fourteen minutes away. I can get there in less time if I’m properly motivated and traffic is light. One day, that home won’t be so accessible to me, I don’t think. I will be farther away from it, and it will be farther away from me. I don’t want to think about that but that is, I think, a writer’s job, isn’t it? To not only think of such things, but to put them down for others to think about for themselves.

Where, I wonder, do you go to when you become… unsure of who you are now? Where…