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Mark Twain's Two Views Of The Mississippi

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College: Game Over
College! The land of financial aid, first cars, and finally being considered an adult by your parents! Or at least, that’s what I had thought. My college experience and the things that I learned and lost throughout my journey through college can be related to a short story by Mark Twain titled, “Two Views of The Mississippi”. This is a short story detailing the author’s mental struggle as he realizes the gradual shift of his perspective from one of awe and wonder to one of a clinical and logical nature. In recognizing this shift he realizes that he had lost the passion he first held for this river and that his appreciation of it was fading. The traits that I have gained and lost while in college are similar to Twain’s gains …show more content…

He speaks of the irreplaceable knowledge that he has gained throughout his travels on this river stating, “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book‐‐a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve”, but Twain laments over the clinical nature of his thoughts, stating “the romance and beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat” and seems remorseful that his views of the river have changed. Maybe knowledge is a double edged sword. Throughout his writing Twain stresses that he has gained important knowledge, but he may have also been warning the reader that as he gained knowledge he lost something just as important. Twain’s story carries a solemn and bittersweet message when he states, “I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. […] a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river’s face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them” Regretting the loss of his acknowledgement, Twain recognized that his increasing knowledge of the river was caused the river’s beauty to lose …show more content…

First attending college was similar to jumping to the extra hard difficulty on a game that I never tried to play seriously. The first few weeks weren’t tough at all, they were low level trolls and goblins that I, the 17 year old hung-over dark elf, could handle without any problems. The next few levels were oddly hard for me to keep up but I managed, and gradually it became difficult for me to keep up all together. Right when I felt like giving up; right when I thought I had enough; right when my health bars were reaching zero, I managed to defeat the rest of the low level goblins and take a much needed breather. Then WHAM! There’s a boss level monster called midterms! I wasn’t prepared for any of this! Not the homework or the bullshit system named MyMAthLab and definitely not the midterms! I ended up dropping the majority of my classes and barely passing the ones that I still kept. After a while, I started to view college as a reality, not just a game. It became more than just a place to work towards, it was a place to work past. College was eating breakfast in the car on the way to school, and living in the library between classes and falling asleep in your car. It was actually doing a foreign ritual called studying and humbling myself enough to ask for help. It wasn’t the fun, simplistic challenge that I had expected it would be, and quite frankly, college beat my ass until

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