SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 23 (of 78)
Pilot’s License (1859)
Chapter 23
Pilot’s License (1859)
The next year, 1859, when I was twenty-three, I received my steamboat pilot’s license. I had never been so proud since I marched in the Cadets of Temperance, swelling around, swinging my baton back and forth, and drinking in the adulation and spellbound awe of the crowd—or so I interpreted their countenances at the time, anyway. I would not again feel as proud of a personal accomplishment that this legal right to pilot steamboats officially bugled forth until I received my honorary doctorate from Oxford three years ago, in 1907.
To some, the license may seem more important than the red sash I was allowed to wear with the Cadets, and the degree perhaps of yet greater import than the license. Yet, nothing that deeply moves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size. And all of those things were of enormous proportions to me at their given time.
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Blackbird Crow Raven’s “Rebel With A Cause: Mark Twain’s Hidden Memoirs” is being serialized in this space on substack every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; it is also available in its entirety from here.