An excerpt from 'The Boy in His Winter'

Yes, I was still thirteen years old. I thought I’d made myself clear. I got on the raft with Jim when I was thirteen and got off for the last time— by myself, for Jim had perished—at the same age. One hundred and seventy years had gone, but I hadn’t changed, though my mind must have.  All the long while when I was on the river with and then without Jim, I was living (if you can call it that) in mythic time. I know how hard it is to understand; it is nearly impossible for me to explain without resorting to Einstein’s general and specific theories of relativity, which I don’t understand any more than I understand slow light, time dilation, gravity wells, or black holes. One or another of them may account for the vast span of my existence. (I will not call it my life.) Maybe it has to do with time on a raft, which is slower than that onshore. While Jim and I dawdled our way south, fishing and telling tales, the world on dry land kept another sort of time: that of factories and businesses, of railroads and governments.

PAGES 75-76

Let me describe once again the beauties of the way: There were swans toward shore that knotted behind them long threads of brown water; and herons standing on one leg, necks preening in the light or elongating suddenly to spear small fish flashing in the shallows; and pelicans straining at the oars of their wings; and geese that hurtled down from the upper air, flailing as they skidded to a stop on the face of the water. There were animals onshore drinking from the river and others on the headlands and in the hills. The trees on the hills and in the valleys and pastures beyond them were green or the color of old gold or, farther to the east, white—in their seasons. I knew how the land lay on either side of the great river that divided it. And I had it on good faith that the earth was rich and yielded ample harvests unless it was a time of drought or scorching heat or annihilating rains. But they, also, had their places in the shaping of the people’s character. So, too, the western desert and the northern plains and the smoking cities of the East. The river was not so wide as it was up above, but deeper—its depths communicating to me a knowledge of shoals and reefs and of other things hid­den from view that give us fear and also hope: the one, that we will founder and drown; the other, that we will avoid—by luck or providence—the snares and continue on our way into a future that may be better than the past.

PAGE 84

What do I remember of the thirteen years of child­hood that had gone before the start of our journey? Light and a feeling of lightness, which are no more than vague recollections of childhood, summoned in old age.

What else?

A few vividly colored memories of having played by the Mississippi and in Hannibal's streets and alleys with Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher, of having tormented Jim, of having been afraid of Injun Joe, of having hated Miss Wat­son and the Widow Douglas. Of a circus, a minstrel show, a tent meeting. I'm infuriated by a boyhood that seems, even now, not to have belonged to me but, rather, to have been written for me; and I fear much of my adult life has been spent in a futile resistance to fate.

PAGE 85-86

Two thousand and five. August. The twenty-ninth day. Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. At Venice, southernmost town on the Mississippi, called by some “the end of the world,” I reentered the world and also time.

Time broke over me like an enormous wave, and I was overthrown by its weight and finality. (To admit time is to admit its end.) It staggered me, like an ox by the sledge­hammer. I fell to my knees, but with no thought of praying; my fear was too immediate and electric, crowding out all other thoughts but it. Besides, I had not the habit of prayer and would rather have cursed God in stubborn contrariety because of Miss Watson’s belief that a child could be made pious by the rod and cod-liver oil. She’d tried them on me often, and failed. Unless you were ever, even for a moment, outside time, you can’t know what it means to be thrust into it.

PAGE 93

I cursed [The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn],  and Mark Twain both for their presumption. What did either know of my life's adventure or of Tom's? No more than I had known Jim's thoughts or might know those in the brain of a dog. I despised the book and its words, which had been set out like a trap to take my freedom. I promised myself I would act in a way to guarantee my self's independence. I couldn't have known that—twist and squirm as I might—my course was set. I'd be the man Huck Finn would most certainly have become in the age following the last sentence of Twain's book. At least for a while. Given the age, which was fallen and corrupt, and given the experiences—innocent and also sinister—that had shaped my character, I could be nothing else.