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Show 25 discipline as he could, talking to himself in his journal about courage and cowardice, accepting the truism that No man knows himself, - or rather no man knows his future self, if he did he would be a prophet, & far more . . . And finally he went to Nature for solace, despite his fear of her. He tried to listen to the Palm Tree, just as he had listened to the live oaks of Bonaventure. This was his course in discipline, and it allowed him to finally accept what he had announced in Bonaventure, but in more concrete terms. A man might be repelled by alligators, snakes, and other members of God's family. He might fear his death in the jaws of Nature's wild creatures. Yet these antipathies, he argued, were the morbid productions of "the proprieties of civilization." Here is the best example of the difference between the original and published versions of Thousand Mile Walk: Muir later revised this phrase to read "ignorance and weakness," thus deemphasizing the degree of his own rebellion during this journey. And in his notebook he drew a picture of a smiling alligator watching a happy brother devour a man. He hoped that he had reformed his attitude, once he had seen the alligators "at home." One might argue that Muir was simply following the ascetic discipline revealed in his account of conquering the fear of water in Story of my Boyhood and Youth. There, he was ashamed to discover that he could panic and nearly drown. His cure for this weakness was to throw himself back into the |
