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Show 92. Other post-Emersonian writers wondered about becoming "part and parcel of Nature," particularly Thoreau when he climbed Ktaadn in The Maine Woods, and Melville when he narrated his climb up the masthead in Moby Dick. Thoreau found the summit of Ktaadn hostile because "The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe." Nature spoke to him there, but asked him sternly, "Why came you before your time? This ground is not prepared for you. Is it not enough that I smile upon the valleys? . . . Why seek me where I have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a step mother?" Muir did not share several of Thoreau's assumptions. He neither believed that Nature was making certain parts of the earth for man, nor that she could be hostile. Certainly he found her a cold but very beautiful mother in the glacial womb. He sought her in such a place precisely because she was still at work, and she in turn attracted him maybe even too powerfully, for he needed to resist the urge to stay in her icy depths. Even though he was not on the warm Sierra granite he had learned to traverse bare handed and barefoot, even though his naked fingers were benumbed, and the cold would travel eventually from his extremities to his vital center, he was not ready to give up his faith in Nature. Melville argued that annihilation was the consequence of becoming part and parcel of Nature. If Muir persisted in |