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Show XI, American tragedy - social, psychological, and spiritual." I finally realized that I could only attempt to deal with these issues, particularly the last one, by attempting to write a book which judged the late Muir in the context of his younger self. I would try to ask the important questions which revealed the significance of particular facets of Muir's life. I would follow his conscious decisions about the important themes in his life. And yet I saw, as I began to write, that I would not be able to answer all of my friends' or my own questions. Indeed I found that I sometimes merely articulated the complexity of the questions, as Muir saw them and as I see them today. That is perhaps as it should be. Many of the issues Muir explored are eternal and have no final answers. Perhaps what he had to teach was that a man might never solve all the problems he began to uncover when he began to ask, what is the right relationship between Man and Nature, Civilization and Wilderness? But without wondering, without thinking deeply about these questions, a man could not become himself. And in this sense I realized that Muir's life, like my own experience in the Sierra, could be best appreciated as an unending meditation on the meaning of life. No book could ever exhaust that meditation, just as no book will ever exhaust the mystery and wonder of the mountains. |