Twain’s homes were included in the Gilder and Wolfe volumes, and the Langdon family library included a copy of the Briggs book that may have caught Twain’s eye. and Joseph Gilder’s Authors at Home (1888), and Theodore Wolfe’s Literary Shrines: Some Haunts of Famous American Authors (1895), Literary Homes and Haunts (1899), and Literary Rambles at Home and Abroad (1901). Briggs’s Homes of American Authors (1853), J. Twainians are not alone: This has long been true for all readers who find themselves at literary shrines, as evidenced by the dozens of books about such shrines that have found eager buyers for more than a century, beginning with several during Twain’s lifetime, including Charles F. But none of this wisdom ever discouraged a Twainian, and when a Twainian finds himself in a place where Twain once breathed the air, time and place begin to blur and the present recedes as the tidal past rolls in. Shakespeare said the past is prologue Faulkner said the past is not only not dead–that it’s not even past and, Mark Twain wrote in one of his letters that the one thing we must remember about the past is that we can’t restore it. But it is human, and few of us could stand below the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and not hear the echo of Martin Luther King’s immortal aspiration, or walk in the pastoral greenery of Gettysburg and not think the quietude ironic, or stand in any Nazi death camp and not be stricken with anger and grief.
Can anyone honestly say they have stood for a moment at a historic site and not imagined the past coming alive? This blending of time and place, past with the present, may be a uniquely human strength, or perhaps a childish weakness.
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