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Show 52, one commentator has observed his "equal interest in the abundance of flowers and the structure of the peak." Of course. How could he separate the pleasures of granite from the pleasures of white heather? The rock and the flower were interfused. All of this mingling of the senses was a good deal more disciplined than it might have seemed. Muir was not on vacation in the Sierra, he was rather learning to inhabit the mountains. This activity was his life. He was neither botanist nor geologist, but a whole man in a whole Nature, yearning. No wonder he was not singleminded. No wonder he didn't wish to narrow his attention to the pointed aims which a technical education might have given him. Everything was interesting to him. He scarcely seemed aware of the serious split in consciousness which seemed to be man's fate, the split between knowledge (grand mechanical causes) and spirit (the beauty). Muir wanted them both, and never thought that they could be separate. What if Muir had taken an excursion with Clarence King, the tough minded product of Yale's Sheffield Scientific School and member of the Whitney Survey? Though Jeanne Carr once hoped to introduce the two to each other, they would never walk through the Sierra together, or agree about its origin. But their differences went deeper than geological theory. King would be suspicious of Muir for many reasons, and would play the role of Geologist Working. Muir would be interested in everything around, would stop every so often to examine a flower and to marvel at the view, to grin slyly while running |