| OCR Text |
56 I spring to my feet crying: "Heavens and earth! Rock is not light, not heavy, not transparent, not opaque, but every pore gushes, glows like a thought with immortal life!" This passage illustrates as well as anything what had happened to him. Certainly if he were following the Humboldt tradition, all natural sciences were only methods used to approach the grand and whole cosmos. But Muir had also been following a path which led him into a more and more simplified ecological system. He had, in other words, simplified his life by simplifying his environment, to the point where he was awakened by the stark primitive contrasts which surrounded him. The Sierra itself demanded to be considered in its full and divine light, which was geological. George Shaller argues that "mountains and deserts, with their spare life at the limit of existence, make one restless and disconsolate; one becomes an explorer in an intellectual realm as well as in a physical one." But Muir had transcended the restlessness Shaller speaks of. In the realm of cloud and rock, Muir awakened to the Sierra as an organic whole. His own vision had widened to that extent. So he began to seek after the origins of things, once he knew that the Sierra was one live, pulsing creation. He wanted to get at the essentials in the landscape, as in himself. He had reached the living bedrock of his soul and of the Sierra. So he was led into the wilderness within and without, and he would not cease until he had plumbed the depth of the Sierra's natural history, as well as his own. |
