# understanding and aesthetic experience **Opening (not a real abstract):** Aesthetic experience on the Mississippi In Life on the Mississippi Mark Twain remarks: The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice… In truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it, painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading matter. Now when I had mastered the language of this water… I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the **Authors:** [[carlson]]