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Show 45 consciousness. When he realized that he was gathering impressions which would grow cosmic in scope, he came to realize that he couldn't take a waterfall, a storm, or even a flower with him when he found it in the wilds. He could store it in his memory, but it was better to see that Nature as discipline required giving up any other home but the wilderness. Collecting is an anthropocentric activity. A man gathers around himself all of his experience, a list of the birds he has seen or a list of the mountains he has climbed, a collection of color transparencies. Even in the late nineteenth century, scientists were making a very slow transition from categorizing, collecting, and building systems, to a Darwinian view that such collections were only evidence, abstracted, and thus deceiving, of the flux of Nature. The problem, as Muir discovered at Smokey Jack's sheep camp, was that a man could rarely see the flux in Nature, could not see geological change, or biological change. It was a process beyond his everyday scope. But collecting, gathering specimens, and then taking them home to be classified and indexed, was counterproductive, because it discouraged seeing these living organisms among their neighbors. Wood's Botany gave a false notion about botany. It did not describe the world as man experienced it, or even as it was experiencing itself. Muir finally realized this in theory, but was never able to put it completely into practice, I think. It would have led him to a more radical view of the wilderness experience, and a greater distrust of man and his books. |