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Show 132. iot in the sense they supposed. When he l e f t the home he had idopted in Tuolumne Meadows, he knew t h a t he would sooner or Later confront h i s own i g n o r a n c e , but he knew a l s o t h a t t h is iad always been the s t o r y of the p r o d i g a l son. "The sense of peace one finds in Enlightenment i s indeed t h a t of a wanderer getting safely home," says one r e l i g i o u s commentator. More important, perhaps, was M u i r ' s r e a l i z a t i o n t h a t a l l the S i e r ra had become h i s home. His v i c t o r y was achieved when he had learned to l i v e according to a law l a r g e r than himself, when he learned to follow a path which he had not made, and for which he had no map. As soon as he had awakened to and recognized the wholeness of the world, he had become whole. In his excursion to Mount R i t t e r , he was f i n a l l y born i n t o the world which was h i s home. He had a l s o defined for himself what a wilderness meant. EGO GAMES Sometimes it is difficult to sift the essential from the merely distracting aspects of a human activity- There is no escaping the fact that Muir was quite a competitive mountaineer, especially when it came to Clarence King, who tended to add literary embellishments to narratives of his own ascents. As Kevin Starr argues, "Muir despised King's elaborate self-consciousness, his risk-taking as a form of existential encounter." So Muir frequently deprecated King's exploits, Particularly with regard to the difficulty of Mount Tyndall, |
