¶ … Mark Twain talks mostly about the river and his experiences as a steamboat captain, but much of what he says also applies to the rest of life. The lesson about life that he makes has to do with how people see things for the first time and how they see them after they are used to them. When he first saw the river he was amazed by its beauty and everything was new and fascinating to him. After he had to spend a great deal of time on the river as a steamboat captain he ceased to see the wonder and awe in much of the beauty that the river held and eventually he would cease to notice it altogether. Instead, he would only be looking for the problems that might underlie some of the things he noticed about the river and would not see the beauty anymore.

By becoming to used to something and learning it too well he had become cold and clinical about it instead of taking time to enjoy many of the things that nature had provided. Just like it was for Mark Twain and his river so it is with many things in life for other people. When someone learns a trade and understands it so well that he or she knows everything about it the beauty and wonder that first interested that person is often gone. It makes Mark Twain, and likely many other people as well, wonder if learning the trade was worth the loss of the beauty and wonder. Did someone who loses these things gain enough to make the trade worthwhile? That is a question that only the person who has made that trade can answer, but it seems like Mark Twain did not really think that the trade he had made was worth the loss of the wonder and beauty that he had first seen when he had looked upon the river. Once something like that is gone it can never be recovered because so much is known about the thing in question that it can never again be seen in the same way that it was when the person first looked at it and saw how much beauty it held.