Notebook
Guides know about enough English to tangle everything up so that a man can make neither head nor tail of it. They know their story by heart—the history of every statue, painting, cathedral, or other wonder they show you. They know it and tell it as a parrot would—and if you interrupt, and throw them off the track, they have to go back and begin over again. All their lives long, they are employed in showing strange things to foreigners and listening to their bursts of admiration. It is human nature to take delight in exciting admiration. It is what prompts children to say “smart” things, and do absurd ones, and in other ways “show off” when company is present. It is what makes gossips turn out in rain and storm to go and be the first to tell a startling bit of news. Think, then, what a passion it becomes with a guide, whose privilege it is, every day, to show to strangers wonders that throw them into perfect ecstasies of admiration! He gets so that he could not by any possibility live in a soberer atmosphere. After we discovered this, we never went into ecstasies any more—we never admired anything—we never showed any but impassible faces and stupid indifference in the presence of the sublimest wonders a guide had to display. We had found their weak point. We have made good use of it ever since. We have made some of those people savage, at times, but we have never lost our own serenity.
—Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
As a young kid (10-13), I used to go up to St. Patrick’s Cathedral (I grew up in Brooklyn) and show the tourists around for tips, telling them everything I knew (and some things I made up) about the cathedral. It was mostly Western European and Asian tourists (this being the late 80s, early 90s) who knew enough English to read for themselves, but they delighted in having me show them around. Most of the staff didn’t mind either, though of course they had their own guided tours. It remains one of the best jobs I’ve ever had.
— hugo · Jan 30, 09:28 PM · #