Category Archives: Religious Quest in the Modern Age

Group Thinks v. Long Thinks

February 16, 2023Classic Books, Critical thinking, Fellow Feeing, religion, Religious Quest in the Modern Agemeanderer007

In the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck encounters a number of deep moral dilemmas. The biggest of course is whether or not he should help Jim a slave escape from his “rightful owner” a woman who had never done him any harm. Huck “knows” what he should do. His conscience tells him that. He should not help a slave to escape. That would be wrong. But Huck stops and makes “a long think.” He must think critically.

Huck is also challenged by religion. He was taught that ever since he was born. Religion, together with the notion of white supremacy, is the ideology of his life. He “knows” it is right yet is challenged about it. Both of these are ideologies. They are both born from group think. We believe what we are taught by our team.

When Huck was having difficulties falling into the group think, Miss Watson would take him into the closet and pray with him.

“But nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn’t so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn’t any good to me without hooks. I tried for hooks there or four times., but somehow I couldn’t make it work. By and by, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool. She never told me why. And couldn’t make it out no way. ”

As a result, Huck did what he should do. He “set down one time back in the woods, and had a long think.” He thought about it critically with all his faculties. His reasoning would not be considered very sophisticated. As he said,

“I said to myself, if a body can get anything they pray for why don’t Deacon Winn get back the money he lost on pork? Why can’t the widow her snuff-box that was stole? Why can’t Miss Watson fat up? No, I says to myself, there ain’t nothing in it. I went and told the widow about it and she said, the thing a body could get by praying for it was “spiritual gifts.” This was too many for me, but she told me what she meant—I must help other people, and do everything I could for others, and look out for them all the time and never think about myself…I went out in the woods and turned it over in my mind a long time, but I couldn’t see no advantage about it—except for the other people, so I reckoned I wouldn’t worry about it anymore, but just let it go.”

Ironically this is exactly what Huck later did. He followed her advice when it came to helping Jim. He neglected in the extreme what was good for himself—namely avoiding hell, but helped Jim anyway. And this is really what religion is all about. It is not about praying for fishhooks. It is about felling empathy for others, like Huck did to Jim. In Huck’s case it was his critically thinking, not his religious ideology that led him to do the right thing. His religious ideology taught him to do the wrong thing, namely worry about eternal heaven at the cost of his friend’s freedom. His ideology misfired. He said he would listen to this ideology but could not do it. He rejected the group think and did the right thing, thanks to a long think.

A long think combined with fellow feeling is a most powerful force!

I think that is what the religious quest in the modern age is all about.

Shouldn’t we all make more long thinks?

We need a Spiritual Declaration of Independence

February 14, 2023Classic Books, Freedom, Religious Quest in the Modern Agemeanderer007

The original American dream was a dream of freedom. Sadly, that dream is often for sale or forsaken. Many Americans have given up on that dream. They are willing to turn their lives over to a strongman, no matter how foul. They have traded their freedom for the perceived belief that only a strong man can save them from the carnage. Instead of freedom these paltry Americans (just like their equally paltry Canadian cousins) want security or wealth or fame or grimy tax breaks.

The members of the fictional world, epitomized by Huck Finn who would not give up his freedom for anything, are the real heroes of the American and Canadian dreams. As Azar Nafisi said,

“We must remember that, despite the prevailing attitude today that arrogantly defines success as money, the real heroes of this nation’s fictional landscape are vagrants, marginal, and subversive, from Melville’s Bartleby, the scrivener whose mantra is “I would prefer not to,” the heroines of Henry James and Edith Wharton, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Zora Neal Hurston’s Janie, Bellows Herzog, Philip Roth’s Sabbath or Omar Little of The Wire, who reminds us of the importance of a code of honor. All seek integrity and listen to their hearts’ dictates, cautioning us against our willingness to betray the American dream when it is, as Fitzgerald put it, besmirched with the “foul dust that floats in the wake” of our dreams.”

That is why Nafisi said “we must make a new declaration of independence, a spiritual rather than a political one this time.”

Like young but brave Huck Finn, all must be able to enjoy “a freedom to turn their back on society and what is expected of them, and to forge their own lonely path.”

Like Huck we must be free to abandon conventional wisdom or morality and “light out for the territory.” If Huck can do it, we can do it. The American dream, which really is also the Canadian dream, may be besmirched but it is not dead—yet.

I would go so far as to say that is a religious quest in the modern age.

Fiction vs. reality

February 8, 2023Classic Books, Religious Quest in the Modern Agemeanderer007

This is of course not the first time I read The Adventures of Huckleberry. It is at least the second. I am trying to re-read at least one classic book each year. I know the last time I read it, about 30 years ago, or more, I was a bit put off by some of the fantastical elements. I thought they were too far out there. Not real. Not believable.

Now with the maturity of a second read, I feel differently about these fantastical elements. They are fantastic. There is no doubt about that. But they have their place. They are there for a reason.

I know I was deeply perplexed by the scenes involving the Duke and the Dauphin. These were two obvious conmen. Who could take them seriously? Not even rural rubes from Missouri could be fooled by these knaves. At least so I thought.

Now after my own “long think,” as Huck would call it, I feel differently. They are absurd and fantastical, but that is exactly the point. Reality is no less absurd! In fact, reality is much more absurd than these fantastic or fabulist elements. After all, what could be more absurd and unbelievable than Jim, the noblest character in the novel, being owned by others solely because the “owners” have a different coloured skin than Jim does? That is the “real world” of Missouri in the middle of the 19^th century. It is a world in which a noble black man can be ripped from his family and sold “down river” to evil men in the deep south of America just because these white men claim ownership. And in that process these evil white men are constantly supported by the law, the churches, and “the good people” like Miss Watson. It is impossible for a writer of fiction to come up with anything as fantastic and unbelievable as this so-called reality.

And that is the point. Fiction is a mighty weak force for creating unreality compared to the powers that be.

In the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn many people tell stories. The worst is probably Tom Sawyer in his short but extravagant appearance in the novel. He manipulates fakeries and puts the life of Jim in danger as a result. He means well, but he stresses out Jim to the point of torture with his crazy stories and absolute necessity of doing what the books say to save Jim when there is an obvious simpler saner way to do it. The fraudulent Duke and the dauphin are constantly making up stories to set people up to be conned. Pap rants and raves in his wild stories. And the pious Miss Watson tells stories about heaven and hell while she prepares to separate a black man from his wife by selling them down the river to different owners. Thankfully though she recants. Jim brings everyone down to reality. Jim shows the reality of his suffering and his pain that almost everyone else is blind to because he is black.

Fiction can be true in the same sense that sacred texts are true. It is not because either of them produce facts. They don’t. But a work of fiction, like a work of faith, can have a much deeper reality than the paucity of surface facts. Such texts can show a deeper reality, if not a literal reality. They don’t need to show a literal reality, which, after all, can be a pretty thin gruel. It is as nonsensical to read a work like the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to find facts as it is to find facts through a literal reading of the book of Genesis. And both exercises lead to perverse consequences. In both cases the person intended to benefit from the exercise is put in jeopardy instead, like poor Jim in jail being rescued by Tom Sawyer who merely desires to make the plot glorious no matter how much danger his planning puts Jim into. The literal reality is not important. The deeper reality is all. Just as it was absurd for Tom Sawyer to plumb works of literature to learn how to rescue Jim from jail, so it is absurd to read the book of Deuteronomy to find rational ethical principles. Yet neither texts are less for that. Both can sing with truth.

Heaven and Hell in Huckleberry Finn

February 3, 2023Classic Books, Indigenous Treaties, Religious Quest in the Modern Agemeanderer007

Huck Finn, like Mark Twain, was not really that keen on heaven. Twain also pursued this theme with his classic sense of humour in a wonderful essay called “Letters from the Earth.” It is well worth reading.

In many ways, hell seemed more attractive to Huck than heaven. As he thought to himself after Miss Watson tried to extoll the benefits of heaven to Huck, “Then she told me all about the bad place, and I said, I wished I were there.” Miss Watson said it was wicked to say that. But in his resolve Huck remained firm: “I couldn’t see no advantage in going where she was going, so I made up my mind, I wouldn’t try for it.” Why try hard to get to a place that really didn’t seem that attractive? But Miss Watson did not give us so easily. But neither did Huck. Twain described their spiritual tussle this way:

“…she went on and told me all about the good place. She said all a body would have to do there was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever. So I didn’t think much of it. But I never said so. I asked her if she reckoned Tom Sawyer would go there and she said not by a considerable sight. I was glad about that, because I wanted him and me to be together.”

Once again, Huck was prepared to go to hell for a friend. Friendship was more important than religious ideology. Even an ideology he had been swimming in since birth and even though it came with powerful religious artillery. He even wished his friend would be in hell to keep their friendship intact.

The Religion of Huck Finn: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

January 31, 2023Classic Books, Conservative, Religious Quest in the Modern Agemeanderer007

Some of the absurdity in the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is of course the result of taking religion too literally. Sometimes that means Huck and Tom and others times the civilized people. Taking religion literally is always risky. As Huck reported early in the book, after he got in trouble for failing to behave as he so often did:

“Then Miss Watson she took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn’t so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn’t any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hook three or four times, but somehow I couldn’t make it work. By and by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me but she said I was a fool. She never told me why and I couldn’t make it no way.”

How could it be that religion worked for people like Miss Watson and not Huck? He must be doing something wrong. So again, he did what he always did, he thought about it. As Huck said,

“I set down one time way back in the woods and had a long think about it. I said to myself, if a body can get anything they pray for why don’t Deacon Winn get back the money he lost on pork? Why can’t the widow get back her silver snuff-box that was stole? Why can’t Miss Watson fat up? No says I, to myself, there ain’t nothing in it. If I went and told the widow about it and she said the thing a body could get by praying for it was “spiritual gifts.” This was too many for me, but she told me she meant—I must help other people, and do everything I could for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never think about myself.”

Interestingly, this later of course turned out to be true, for Huck really did spiritual gifts when he ignored his own welfare and thought just of Jim.

Though Huck was not satisfied with this advice he actually soaked it in through osmosis for later that is exactly what he did when he saved Jim for the slave hunters and he won Jim’s freedom and in doing so won his own freedom as well! It was marvellous advice but it didn’t’ smell right to Huck. Such advice always seemed like a con to a rapscallion like Huck but it really is the best advice he could get.

Pap, his father, on the other hand gave him the worst possible advice. He taught him how to lie and steal as much as he could and only look out for himself.

Tom Sawyer on the other hand advised Huck to get his advice from books like Don Quixote because they were all about “enchantment.” I would have thought this would have been pretty good advice actually, but later in the book we learn how crazy it was when someone like Tom Sawyer takes his books as literally as the Bible Thumpers take theirs. Tom even said, “I judged that all that stuff was only just one of Tom Sawyer’s lies. I reckoned he believed in the A-rabs and the elephants, but as for me, I think different. It had all the marks of a Sunday school.”

An independent thinker like Huck would avoid the traps of traditional belief if he could, but he found it very hard, as he later learns. He puts eternal life on the line! You can’t get braver than that.

Deep Freedom

January 22, 2023Classic Books, Exploitation, Freedom, racism, Rebel, Religious Quest in the Modern Agemeanderer007

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a book about freedom. It is about the freedom of young boys who are smothered by demands that they conform to narrow constraints of maiden aunts and Sunday schools. And that is important. Revolting from such constraints is the freedom Huck seeks. That is the freedom that Huck seeks and is willing to pay the ultimate price when he lights out for the territory. He wants it even if means hell.

But it also about freedom that a large portion of Americans didn’t enjoy, namely the indigenous and black people of America. The freedom extolled by Americans since the time of the Puritans that for some reason was not for them. Some of them in fact were enslaved—i.e., as unfree as they possibly could be in this land lauded as being the land of the free. It was free only for some. Most them were white and most of them were men.

The novel is also about freeing humans like Huck from the ideas that enslave him. These are the ideas—like making humans into property—that Huck must learn to renounce. And it is hard to renounce ideas with which we have grown up.

How can anyone who believes in and relishes freedom as so many Americans and Canadians do, ever think that slavery is acceptable? Canadians have to remember that slavery was also prevalent in Canadian society. Canada was much more than the underground railway inviting in slaves to sanctuary.

When charlatans, murderers, and thieves join the “God-fearing” white folks of the community to chase down en mass Jim the runaway slave, Huck says, aptly, “It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.”

Mark Twain once said, “Lincoln’s proclamation…not only set the black slaves free, but set the white man free also.” I believe that is profoundly true.

This is beautifully materialized in the character of Jim the black slave. Jim frees Huck. In pursuing freedom for Jim, Huck is also freed from the chains of the Sunday school marms.

Sin is hard to Give up

January 19, 2023Books, Classic Books, Religious Quest in the Modern Agemeanderer007

In the novel the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck is tormented by his actions in helping Jim escape from his rightful owner. He even considered doing the “right thing” and telling Miss Watson what he had done and deliver Jim back to her. He thought Jim might be better off as a slave near his family.

Huck gave up on that idea because no doubt Miss Watson would not accept anything from him because of Jim’s rascality and ungratefulness. After all, the slave should have been grateful, Huck thought, for having such a good master as Miss Watson. Miss Watson would likely sell Jim down the river again because “everybody naturally despises an ungrateful nigger.” After all, Huck was also scared that everyone would find out that Huck had disgraced himself by helping Jim escape. This is what he thought about that”

“And then think of me! It would get around that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom; and if I was ever to see anybody from that town I’d be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame.”

But that was only the half of it. After all he committed a sin. As Huck said,

“Well, I tried the best I could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I wasn’t so much to blame, but something inside of me kept saying, “There was the Sunday school, you couldn’t ‘a’ gone to it; and if you’d ‘a’ done it they’d ‘a’ learnt you there that people that acts as I’d been acting about the nigger goes to everlasting fire.”

Huck even tried prayer. On his knees filled with repentance for what he’d done. But he couldn’t do it:

“But the words wouldn’t come out. Why wouldn’t they come? warn’t no use to run and hide it from Him. Nor from me neither. I knew very well why they wouldn’t’ come. It was because my heart warn’t right’ it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie.”

Helping Jim, Huck believed was a sin that would lead him to hell, yet he did anyway. Huck was greatly relieved when he realized this because he knew he had done a very bad thing. As Huck said,

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had felt so good in all my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight of, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened and so how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And I went on thinking over our trip down the river and and I see Jim before me all the time; in the day and in the night time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along dark, talking’ singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind

No matter what ideology he had been brought up with, Huck was able to break out of it. He just couldn’t be a supporter of slavery no matter how sinful he thought that made him. His natural goodness burst through the chains of ideology. He was prepared to go to hell if necessary.

Friendship or Hell?

January 18, 2023Books, Classic Books, Freedom, Morality, religion, Religious Quest in the Modern Agemeanderer007

I have come to the conclusion that Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is my favorite novel. It is the classic of classics. Why is that? What makes it so great? I think it so great because explores, as no one else has done as well, the issue of freedom. Above all it explores the freedom to think for oneself. So many people extoll the virtues of freedom particularly in the US and Canada. But I find they mostly have a very shallow notion of what freedom is all about. Not so with Twain. He knew what ultimate freedom is all about.

The novel Huckleberry Finn challenges all authority. None are sacred. Particularly the sacred is not sacred. Freedom from authority is the real freedom.

Huck Finn’s journey with Jim down the Mississippi River was a journey towards knowledge. It was an education. Huck has to learn, and even more important, he has to unlearn. As Nafisi said, he was on a trip in which Huck is “countering the lessons of Sunday school.”

The novel challenges the morality of slavery, but it actually goes much farther than that. The trip to the dangerous south asks a more fundamental question: What can you do when your moral code lets you down? That is what Huck wrestles with throughout the novel.

The central question Huck must deal with is how can he help his friend Jim by finding freedom when he “knows” that is wrong. In fact, Huck “knows” that is a sin to help a slave to freedom. That is what he learned in Sunday School and from Aunt Sally, Miss Watson, and the Widow Douglas. But he must unlearn that. As Huck says, “I couldn’t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way.” When Huck is fighting with his conscience he comes across slave hunters and resolves to deliver Jim to them, because it is the right thing to do, but as hard as he tries to do the right thing he cannot give up his friend. He thinks he is not man enough to do what he “should” do.

When Huck has difficult decisions to make he always has “a long think.” That is a good practice. He thinks slowly and critically. But he thinks. As he says to himself, and of course, us, “The more I studied about this the more my conscience was grinding me, and the more wicked and lowdown and ornery I got to feeling.” If he had gone to Sunday School as he should have, he would have learned that “people that acts as I’d been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire.” He even tries to pray but his “heart wasn’t right.” Again he decides to do the “right thing” and give up Jim by writing to Miss Watson. As soon as he rights the letter he feels much better. His conscience is finally clear. He feels “good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I even felt in my life and I knowed I could pray now.” But even then he continues to think and that is his undoing. He think too much and decides he will go against everything he has ever been taught. It is extremely difficult to do.

And then Huck considers the reality of Jim. He continues to think through the day after he wrote the letter to Miss Watson. In a remarkable statement that shows the power of genuine connection compared to the disrupted connection of a corrupt ideology, Huck says this:

“I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moon time, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow sometimes I couldn’t seem to strike no place to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was; when I come back out of the fog; and when come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I truck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in then the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look and see that paper [the letter he wrote to Miss Watson but had not yet sent, that would return Jim to slavery].

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling because I’d got to decide forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then I’ll go to hell—and tore it up.”

I think Twain is saying if you look at the real person, rather than the person you expect to see through the lens of your religion, or politics, or ideology then you can see the real person. Notice too how Huck and Jim have become “we.” They are connected by a deep sense of fellow feeling. That is what real morality, and real art, and real religion are all about. They are not about ideology or dogma.

Has there ever been a greater friendship in all of literature than this? Has there ever been a greater friendship in the whole world than this? Huck was prepared to do what he believed was wrong because that is what he was taught, and that is what everybody did, in order to save his friend, even though it meant going to hell?

That is what ultimate freedom is all about!

Huck Finn : The Rebel

January 13, 2023Books, CBC radio, Classic Books, Rebel, Religious Quest in the Modern Agemeanderer007

As readers of my blog may remember I am engaged in two quests. One is to pursue the religious quest in the modern age. The other, is to re-read at least one book each year. Well reading this book does both!

I am often asked what is the best novel ever written? I answer that question in different ways at different times. That is entirely appropriate to a person who is meandering, uncertainly, I hope, towards the truth. In my opinion this book is certainly one of the best novels ever written, perhaps the very best. I think is my favourite novel of all time!

The book was published first in England in 1884 and America in 1885. In many ways it is the story of America.

Please note in this review I won’t worry about ‘giving things away”. Even if one hasn’t read the book it has been around long enough that everyone knows what the book is about and more or less what happens. So if you don’t like that, read the book first. It is much better than this paltry review.

Many years after I read and immensely enjoyed the novel, I read a book by Azar Nafisi called The Republic of the Imagination. It is a book about a number of American novels, including this one. That book significantly deepened my understanding of this great novel. Nafisi was a teacher of English literature in Tehran, Iran, before moving to the United States and becoming an American professor of literature.

That seems almost inconceivable. In Iran she taught a class of mainly young women, many who had asked her to form a book club which she led. One of her students was Farah who was dying but wanted the last year of her life to be devoted to the pursuit of a classic. This book—The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Many people consider this book a book for children, particularly young boys. Why is it that so many great American novels are considered books for children?

Nafisi said about young Iranian women reading this novel:

“The original Huck was our guide, our inspiration, the thorn in our side who reminded us to be true to ourselves and who, goaded us when we became too complacent, too conventional in our preoccupations, whenever we seemed too comfortable with our lot. He gave us vital chaos as the kind of American we wanted to be. He reminded us—best American heroes are wary of being overcivilized, and that they carve out their own path and look to their heart for what is right and just.”

Nafisi denied that a book was in the ordinary sense moral. She did say this, “it can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.” That is precisely what Huck Finn does. It wakes us from our moral slumbers. And all of us fall into such slumbers. It is intellectual indolence. A common disease.

One of the most amazing scenes in Nafisi’s book is when her class at the University decides to put the book The Great Gatsby on trial. The prosecutor is a strict straight-laced Muslim regime supporter. The defense counsel is one of her female students. It is a remarkable achievement. Both learned a lot by reading closely that novel. According to Nafisi, “a great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals , and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.”

This of course is exactly what happens in a totalitarian society like Iran. The mullahs and morality police control everything in the lives of the people. The people are told what to do and what to think and even what to wear and how to wear it. This is what is now happening in Iran when the people are revolting against these restrictions, but it will be difficult. Yet the courageous women in her class did quietly revolt too. Merely reading Huck Finn was rebellious. Huck Finn was a rebel without a cause. No he was actually a rebel with a cause. A very important cause. We will get into that.

But how different is America? As Nafisi said, “I wanted to write about Huck, to capture what he could teach us, at a time of reality TV and phony bombastic patriotism, about a more authentic American ideal.” It is interesting that I write this right after the 2022 midterm elections in the US. These are normally excruciatingly boring. But this year Americans were given a chance to reject the phony patriotism of the Trumpsters, and at least to some extent they seized the moment. Farah “wanted what Huck appeared to be escaping from—a comfortable and predictable home.” This is what Nafisi wanted too.

Huck of course became an orphan in the book. His father, Pap, was mean and inscrutable and in his death freed Huck. So many novels about orphans who encounter a cruel and ungenerous world but then finds wealthy patron and all is then well. But Huck was different. As Nafisi said about Huck, “But here was one little orphan who not only did not find a home, but was repulsed by its very idea, taking off whenever he was offered one.”

Nafisi made a bold statement about Twain: “If there was any figure in the history of American fiction who through his writing, created a literary declaration of independence, it was Mark Twain.” Huck was the classic scamp, rapscallion, and rebel. He dissented from the moral constraints imposed by society. As Nafisi said,

“Huck was a mongrel, an outcast, uneducated and unmoored, and since his creation countless Americans have recast themselves in his image.. He was suspicious of the smothery ways of conventional society, but in his ideals, his moral courage, his determination to open himself up to the lessons of nature and the vagaries of experience, he was as much a product of the Enlightenment as were George Washington and Benjamin Franklin…”

Twain understood how difficult it was to dissent from conventional morality. It is never easy to turn your back on what most others are doing or saying in your society. It is much easier to paddle with the stream rather than against it. But Huck Finn found he could not do that.

That is why Huckleberry Finn is such a subversive novel.

That is why it is such a great novel.

The Meanderer

The opinions and photos of John E. Neufeld as he meanders through life