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Show 37 that he easily shed the doctrines and lessons which had been taught to him through his youth. I never tried to abandon creeds or code of civilization; they went away of their own accord, melting and evaporating noiselessly without any effort and without leaving any consciousness of loss. This wasn't true. The process was far more conscious, and far more trying than he wished to admit at the time or in later years. For that reason, it is important, if one wishes to grasp a true picture of those crucial years, to be skeptical of his late written narratives. It is even more important to suspect the versions of his journals edited by William Frederick Bade. Even the more accurate edition by Linnie Marsh Wolfe sometimes omits Muir's most radical statements. In the past, few of Muir's editors or biographers have wanted to consider just how rebellious and radical he was in the late sixties. As he battled for his own spiritual integrity, it must have seemed to him that he was "between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born." Between two worlds. One can see this dilemma in a number of ways. It was a personal and spiritual crisis for Muir to leave behind his father's farm and his father's values as well. But discarding his father's version of the Bible was a longer process. And he finally learned that he would have to reject a belief in "a clearly defined correspondence between the laws of Nature and our own." As he began to realize the full implications of this decision, he was living in California, working as a shepherd, and apparently |
