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Show 42. happy," he wrote to his brother Daniel in 1871. But probably Muir was rarely so confident of the direction his own life had taken. He justified himself in his journal, arguing that the rest of the family had all settled down, and there was perhaps room for one of the eight to carry on an experiment in life. All the rest were "exemplary, stable, anti-revolutionary," so he could be spared for something else. It is impossible for me not to draw certain parallels. Thoreau had written, during the Mexican War, that the State itself exerted tremendous force on the individual. "You must live within yourself, and depend upon yourself, always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs," he said. He knew what it meant to go light by leaving the baggage of civilization behind. He felt the burden that my generation has felt, far more impersonal and institutionalized than the forces which worked on Muir. Going light requires that the wanderer turn away from the affairs of state. I remember the meeting of a poetry association on a campus of the University of California in 1969. The group enthusiastically discussed Snyder's Myths and Texts, admiring Snyder's use of John Muir's vision on Mount Ritter. But the group's advisor, a Shakespeare scholar, interrupted our reverie, and argued that Eliot's Wasteland was the last great poem of the twentieth century. There was nothing left but the heavy baggage of civilization, he said. "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." We were young, and many of us would be drafted out of graduate school into Viet Nam. None of us |