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Show 43. could hope to be a Prince Hal, but we were not ready to take drugs and die. I had gotten a deferment, and enrolled in classes, before sneaking off guiltily to the mountains. I did not know enough to respond to the professor with lines from Eliot's Four Quartets: We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. - "Little Gidding," In. 241-244 And I didn't know Snyder's poem, "For the Children," which reminded of a new discipline that reached beyond wasteland: stay together learn the flowers go light - Earth House Hold, p. 86 This would be our answer to the twentieth century. And it had been Muir's answer too. Going light requires that the wanderer forget the nightmare of modern history. When John Muir arrived in Yosemite Valley, he had no reason to believe that he would become the voice of Yosemite, nor did he suspect that he would win a national audience when he began to articulate the glacial theory of the evolution of Yosemite's landscape. All he knew was that he felt blessed, wholly free, reborn. That was enough encouragement to counterbalance all of the social pressures which asked him to come back and settle down. Even if his pursuits were neither |
