Mark Twain would have been an unbelievable blogger. Take the essay "Early Rising, As Regards Excursions to the Cliff House," which appeared July 3rd, 1864 in The Golden Era, a mid-19th Century literary weekly published in San Francisco.
Its substance, as such, is meagre: everyone has told Twain the best time to see the newly built Cliff House (it was a year old at that point) is early. So he leaves at four AM to drive the six miles across town and it's windy, foggy and freezing cold. He doesn't have fun. That's it.
The joy, though, for both Twain and the reader is the extended riff he plays on those bare bones. I won't summarize, since the whole point of the piece is expression, not content. Go read it.
From a modern perspective, what's also striking is that here's a perfect blog entry, turning a mundane excursion into something worth sharing, but written a hundred years before the Internet was even imagined. Its only fault today would be its length, perhaps. But really, you can't -- and shouldn't -- stop a writer like that when he's on such an entertaining roll.
Following in Twain's footsteps, and taking his advice, I visited the Cliff House last weekend with my extended Bay Area family well after dawn. We arrived just before noon and even then the same chilling fog Twain cursed was only just pulling back from the surf. But as it lifted we saw, in quick succession, whales and dolphins swimming by, and dozens of huge grey pelicans crashing into the sea -- all chasing a massive herring ball by the looks of it. We saw seals, too, likely descendants of the very ones the jaundiced Twain described as "writhing and squirming like exaggerated maggots."
After brunch, we walked over to the site of the old Sutro Baths, which I'd never seen. Michael was delighted, calling it a 'wreck' and desperate to explore.
It wasn't long before the fog pulled in again, though, and back on went the layers of extra-clothing that any local visiting a San Francisco beach instinctively brings along.
Thankfully, the fog just as quickly retreated again. We walked to the other side of the Cliff House and played on the beach for a while. A beautiful day.
"If you go to the Cliff House at any time after seven in the morning, you cannot fail to enjoy it," said Mark Twain almost 150 years ago. It doesn't make for such an entertaining blog entry, of course, but thankfully, he's still right.