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 Ann
Cameron
A multiplicity of books changed my life, connecting
me with minds from many nations and ages, making me
a citizen of the world and the universe, instead of
a person bound by the horizons of a village and the
flickering light of the living room TV.
As a young person four books influenced me most-the
meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the dialogues of Plato,
Thoreau's Walden, and Mark Twain's The Prince
and the Pauper. The first two books made me an idealist,
believing in the power of the mind to improve one's
life and give it order and meaning. I loved the stylistic
power of Walden, the exactness of its description.
Often Thoreau writes as if giving tongues to leaves
and riverbanks, as if rather than speaking himself,
he let them speak. "Simplify! Simplify!" Thoreau
said, and following his advice I tried not to encumber
myself with too many possessions, or trade leisure and
the time to think for things I didn't need. It may be
because of Thoreau that I write mostly about people
who don't have much in the way of consumer goods, but
whose minds and spirits reach out to each other and
the universe.
However, in childhood, which is when our character
is mostly formed, I was most influenced by Twain's The
Prince and the Pauper, that wonderful adventure
story where a prince and poor boy change places, the
lonely prince successfully negotiating life on the road
amidst rough gangs, the poor boy succeeding in the role
of prince, even though he does use the royal seal of
England as a nut-cracker.
I thrilled to this adventure, and what I took from
it was Twain's belief that circumstances don't matter
so much in life, that pedigrees and the right address
mean very little compared to native intelligence and
the will to make something of oneself. When I was a
child I didn't know that Twain had been a poor boy in
a frontier town, a boy whose father died young and who
very early became the economic mainstay of his family.
But perhaps I felt it in the rugged courage of his heroes.
And the courage passed to me. I wasn't poor, but I
came from a small town in Wisconsin that nobody had
ever heard of-where, when I was 19, as it almost magically
turned out, I catalogued many books from Mark Twain's
own library-books that he had given to his housekeeper,
Katy Leary, and which her nephew, Warren Leary, the
editor of our town's newspaper, had inherited. With
reverent hands, I touched the copy of Helen Keller's
autobiography that she had autographed to Twain, and
a copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin, autographed to him
by his next-door neighbor in Connecticut, Harriet Beecher
Stowe-books not in the library of my famous college,
Harvard, but simply on bookshelves in a living room
in my own home town.
Greatness can flourish anywhere, and does. Sometimes
we forget to look for it, yet it is there in the people
we know and in ourselves. That's what I learned from
Mark Twain. I tried to learn from those nonfiction writers
Aurelius, Plato, Thoreau, and no doubt I did learn from
them; but the knowledge was mostly just brain-knowledge.
What I learned from the fictional world of The Prince
and the Pauper went all through me, into my heart,
down to feet, up through my ears and even, I think,
into the hair on my head. Without trying to change myself
or even thinking at all about what the book might mean
to me, I was changed by it. How I wish my writing might
be for today's young readers what Twain's was for me-
a source of courage and confidence, writing so close
to their hearts that it becomes entirely theirs-not
so much a way of thinking as a way of being, a way of
walking, a way of meeting the world.
Ann Cameron
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