Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [44]
If there is any life that is happier than the life we led on our timber ranch for the next two or three weeks, it must be a sort of life which I have not read of in books or experienced in person. We did not see a human being but ourselves during this time, or hear any sounds but those that were made by the wind and the waves, the sighing of the pines, and now and then the far-off thunder of an avalanche. The forest about us was dense and cool, the sky above us was cloudless and brilliant with sunshine, the broad lake before us was glassy and clear, or rippled and breezy, or black and storm-tossed, according to Nature’s mood; and its circling border of mountain domes, clothed with forests, scarred with landslides, cloven by cañons and valleys, and helmeted by glittering snow, fitly framed and finished the noble picture. The view was always fascinating, bewitching, entrancing. The eye was never tired of gazing, night or day, in calm or storm; it suffered but one grief, and that was that it could not look always, but must close sometimes in sleep.
And this:
While smoking the pipe of peace after breakfast we watched the sentinel peaks put on the glory of the sun, and followed the conquering light as it swept down among the shadows, and set the captive crags and forests free. We watched the tinted pictures grow and brighten upon the water till every little detail of forest, precipice and pinnacle was wrought in and finished, and the miracle of the enchanter complete.
And also this, years later, while standing before the Sea of Galilee:
When we come to speak of beauty, [the sea] is no more to be compared to Tahoe than a meridian of longitude is to a rainbow. The dim waters of this pool cannot suggest the limpid brilliancy of Tahoe; . . . when the still surface is belted like a rainbow with broad bars of blue and green and white; . . . when [a man’s] boat drifts shoreward to the white water, and he lolls over the gunwale and gazes by the hour down through the crystal depths and notes the colors of the pebbles and reviews the finny armies gliding in procession a hundred feet below. . . . The tranquil interest that was born with the morning deepens and deepens, by sure degrees, till it culminates at last in resistless fascination!
And then dinner. This is why Twain loved Tahoe trout; this is why I take the menu seriously. On one level the menu is a joke, sure—it certainly began that way. But these things, these places, mattered to Twain. He wasn’t a conservationist in the classic sense—he’d come to the lake, after all, with the intention of cutting down as many trees as he could. But his love of place is still moving; it can still inspire. His memory of the lake helped to mark out his life; it returned him to life when he was a young man just fled from war, trailing fingers in cold water.
In his 1825 Physiology of Taste, the great gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin described the experience of a man eating a peach. First he “is agreeably struck by the perfume which it exhales; he puts a piece of it into his mouth, and enjoys a sensation of tart freshness,” then swallows and experiences the full aroma. But “it is not until it has been swallowed that the man, considering what he has just experienced, will say to himself, ‘Now there is something really delicious!’” Memory, for Brillat-Savarin, was not simply the recollection of a taste; memory was part of taste, the means to understanding and holding the fullness of a flavor.
Surely it’s true that memory is what makes taste something more than a momentary sensation. Memory is how a flavor becomes part of our lives. Remembering a taste, a smell—even the sound of cooking, of fresh fish sizzling in bacon fat—can summon vanished landscapes, aspirations, hopes. It can remind you of who you were, and help you see your present life more clearly.
Years later,