Responsibility of an Adult

Duy Ho

Professor Genevieve Zuidervaart

English 100

September 14, 2016

Responsibility of an Adult

Looking back at the old album I found under my bed, the unforgettable memories of the first day of school suddenly flashed back. School used to be my sanctuary place where I learnt so many wonderful things that I’ve never heard before and met all the people that really care about me, but the feeling toward school has changed as I grew up. Since I got older, I have to be responsible for my own life, pay my own bills and figure out my own career path that I will go for the rest of my life; school later becomes an essential place that prepare me with the knowledge and interpersonal skills that help me with my future career, but I can no longer have the sense of excitement and joyfulness when I was young. The famous American author – Mark Twain once wrote the story “Two Views of the Mississippi” about being a novice in the steamboat and then became a river pilot after many years gaining experiences. Through “Two Views of the Mississippi,” Mark Twain expresses the same idea as mine, that the sense of wonder fades away as we get older since we have to be more responsible for our own lives.

When we were young and inexperience, everything was so magical to us. Twain once said: “I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me.”(1882) On the first day he worked as an novice on a steam boat, the majestic sunset scene completely blows his mind; at that moment, Twain just enjoyed the beauty of the river without noticing anything behind it. However, the joyfullness of watching the sunset didn’t last very long; as time passes, Twain gained a lot of experience and became the river pilot but he realized that: “I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!”(1882) Although the experiences that he gained for years help him get to the position of the river pilot but the cost of it was that he can no longer appreciate the attractiveness of the sunset scene on the river. As the captain of the steamboat, Twain is responsible for the safety of the boat so he need to pay attention to significant changes of the nature around him, especially the sunset. The only thing that he can now see around him are just the sign of danger. He notice:

“This sun means that we are going to have wind tomorrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody’s steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that;”

These changes in his mind make him wonder about whether it is “good” or “bad” to gain more experience since it took away the happiness that he had before. Everything on Earth have two sides of it, most of the times you will only see and understand the surface of it but the moment you dig in and see the other side of that thing, your perspective toward it will completely change.