Mark Twain – Twenty years from now…

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away for the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. Mark Twain

An American of Scottish descent, he said this about his travels.

“I feel singularly at home in this Scotch society. I have spent so much time in Scotland that everything connected with Scotland is familiar to me. Last summer I passed five weeks in that magnificent city of Edinburgh, resting. I needed rest, and I did rest. I did not know anybody. I did not take any letters of introduction at all. I simply rested and enjoyed myself. From my experience of the Scotch everything belonging to them is familiar, the language, the peculiarities of expression, even the technical things that are national, are simple household words with me. I remember when in Edinburgh I was nearly always taken for a Scotchman. Oh, yes!I had my clothes some part colored tartan, and I rather enjoyed being taken for a Scotchman. I stuck a big feather in my cap, too, and the people would follow me for miles. They thought I was a Highlander, and some of the best judges in Scotland said they had never seen a Highland costume like mine. What’s more, one of those judges fined me for wearing it—out of mere envy, I suppose.”

Mark Twain on Scotland’, Hartford Courant (20 December 1873)

Even though his clothes had “some part of colored tartan”, he was very disparaging of the proponent of tartan, Walter Scott. He even posed that controversial notion that Scott’s writing had influenced Southern culture and in great part led to the US Civil War.

“Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded forms of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived a good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still.”

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, page 303