I am a great admirer of Mark Twain-I have read just about everything he wrote. Anyway, I have always wondered…can I have the same sensory experience (as Twain did, say in 1876)? Suppose I were to go to the same place he went (Lake Tahoe), and gaze out over the lake-would my brain receive the same inputs as Twain did, and would I have the same experience?
Or was Hericlitus correct-that each moment is unique, and cannot be repeated?
Gonna go with Heraclitus on this…
You can have very similar experiences, but there will always be some differences. In practical terms, there might be an airplane on the horizon, or a motorboat in the river, or someone’s phone rings. Or the water might be a bit too rough, or too still. The clouds might be a bit too wispy.
More philosophically, your own internal mental state is part of the experience. You can’t look out over the river and say, “I am Mark Twain, looking out over this river.” Heck, unless you’ve been a river pilot, you won’t see little details in the same way he would. “That little eddy of water, there, indicates a hidden obstacle.” You can’t look through his eyes, or with his mind. (If you could…you’d be him, not you!)
All that said… I’d do it anyway! It would be mighty nifty to go on a Mark Twain tour of the country, from Hannibal, to the west, and up to Connecticut, etc. See as much as you can of what’s left of his world, reading his books along the way, then reading books about him.
It will be your experience, not his… But it will be in honor of his memory, and dedicated to learning. You can imagine him standing by your side, and, to a judicious degree, interact with this imagined persona. (A variant of that is to watch a one-man-play where an actor speaks as Twain might have. It’s fallacious, for being only an educated guess, but if it’s a good guess, it can be informative.)
What he said. You should go to Tahoe. It’s awsome.
Taking into account the context of your life and the world around you . . . every second of your life is unique. Treasure it.
You know, I’ve often wanted to go to the great pyramids of Egypt and stand in the same spot as the Pharaohs just so I can feel what they felt so long ago.
That said, I agree with Trinopus
I agree that everyone’s experience is unique. But even more so than the conditions of a location may be different from time to time (airplane on the horizon, phone ringing, etc.) but that we are all unique individuals and a lot of how we experience events is based upon our past experiences as well.
Two people can be in the same place at the same time experience the exact same event, and each will describe their experience differently.
Heraclitus was right.
But Democritus gets the last laugh…
(Okay, damned obscure; Charles Valentin Alkan wrote a piano piece that mimics the form of a debate between “Heraclite et Democrite.” Democritus wins the debate with the musical equivalent of an enormous rollicking belly-laugh.)
I experienced some dreamless sleep last night.
Not very unique.