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Show 146. describing the creation of the world. The Sierra became a universal mountain range which told the truth about all mountains. He was making his first attempt to describe the nature of Nature, writing a document which would elucidate his world view. It is impossible to separate his conceptual problems from his articulation. It is probably not true that he conceived his message thoroughly before he found words, yet it is also clear that writing caused him great agony because his vision was so complete in his mind. "Everything is so inseparably united," he lamented. His vision was too whole, to find easy expression in either the language of contemporary science, or the language of contemporary literature. There was nothing new about the perspective which Muir wished to communicate, but he was cut off from the tradition of discourse which might have offered him a way of speaking. A perceptive literary critic can find the language Muir sought in the fragments of Heraclitus, in the Upanishads, the Zend-Avesta, and the Tao Teh Ching, where, as one philosopher argues, there is a coalescence between ideas, things and quality.- between the abstract and concrete. These works, being pre- Cartesian, do not assume the dualism, the division of objective and subjective, knower and known, thinker and thought, matter and spirit. Yet these dualities belong to our own culture much as they were inherent in the language Muir had learned. Hence the problem with inherited language: "most of the words of the English language are made of mud, for muddy purposes, |
