I am willing to believe it. I can believe anything. - Sean Carroll abuses Mark Twain, or vice versa

All right, now I have a real complaint about Remarkable Creatures: its author abuses literature. I didn't actually discover this; mia moglie gets all of the credit.

Here's the epigraph to Remarkable Creatures, or part of it, since it's very long. That's right, this is all about the epigraph:

"What is it that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea--to discover a great thought--an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plow had gone over before... These are the men who have really lived--who have actually comprehended what pleasure is--who have crowded long lifetimes of ecstasy into a single moment."

Plenty more like it in those ellipses. It's the beginning of Chapter 26 of Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain. I ask you, does that sound like Mark Twain? I mean, "many a brain-plow"? Mia moglie looked it over and sagaciously asked what comes after this rather gassy paean to discovery. It's this:

"What is there in Rome for me to see that others have not seen before me? What is there for me to touch that others have not touched? What is there for me to feel, to learn, to hear, to know, that shall thrill me before it pass to others? What can I discover?--Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. One charm of travel dies here."

All right, that sounds like Mark Twain. The high-pitched rhetoric is never more than a setup for the deflation. In this case, at least, Twain doesn't literally contradict the idea of the first passage - he just says that it's unavailable to most people, which may merely contradict a major theme of Carroll's book.

In fairness, two points. First, I actually don't care that Carroll's epigraph crushes the irony of the passage. In fact, I'm positively happy. Epigraphs destroy the old context and create a new one; that's how they work.

Second, who am I to complain, since I once believed that there were locomotives in Arab countries that burned mummies for fuel. In fairness to myself, I read this, stated as fact, in at least two places, although I don't remember where, and neither time did the author tell me that his source was Mark Twain, which might have tipped me off. We're still in Innocents Abroad, chapter 58:

"I shall not speak of the railway, for it is like any other railway--I shall only say that the fuel they use for the locomotive is composed of mummies three thousand years old, purchased by the ton or by the graveyard for that purpose, and that sometimes one hears the profane engineer call out pettishly, 'D--n these plebeians, they don't burn worth a cent--pass out a King;'--[Stated to me for a fact. I only tell it as I got it. I am willing to believe it. I can believe any thing.]"