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Show 21, for his own occupation. This argument might have satisfied a country blacksmith, as Muir claimed it did, but the nagging suspicion remained that he was not doing a real man' s work. The pursuit of wisdom for its own sake, even by a Solomon or Christ, was suspect in post Civil War America, North or South. Was Muir willing to follow his own way, unsupported by human company or approval? He found that it was not entirely possible. He was lonely, even though he received occasional letters from his brother Daniel and Jeanne Carr. He needed to justify himself even if he rejected the doctrines of the people he lived among. He would have to be solitary indeed. The most serious problem in this regard came when he rejected the doctrines of providence and progress. He could still try to justify his own way in Christian terms, because he knew that certain men like the blacksmith or even his father could only listen to ethical arguments about the Book of Nature when they were given in the language of the Bible. But he also knew that he was struggling bitterly with the language as well as the morals presented in the Bible. The blacksmith's argument would haunt Muir. Men in this world got their bread by doing "real" work, not by loving flowers. A man would have few friends to feed him if he never did anything of material significance. If Muir refused to see Nature as commodity, and thus refused to take the male role by working, he also knew that he couldn't go without bread. Later in his journal he wrote, A serious matter is this bread which perishes, and, could |