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Show 179 :he Book of Nature with the books of Man. But Muir and I do iot wish to find our identity in "forms beyond;" we wish to be i part of Nature. We do not fear to be a part of the "given," i part of Nature's bounty, and so we find the terms "driven" and "determined" totally misleading. We may fear the civilized social forces which drive and determine our needs, but we are not afraid of the reduced stature we seem to take on when we stand under El Capitan, or are dwarfed in the midst of Sequoias. It is our true self we see among the rocks and in the sacred groves. So it is that the modern humanist's attitude toward himself and Nature dramatizes precisely the consequences of giving up that clumsy and cliche metaphor of Nature as Book. Muir was not ready in 1874 to give up this value laden way of conceiving natural history. Certainly he began to seek alternatives, when he described rocks which moved like waves, and snow which drifted wave-like over them, but a western audience was not likely to attach value to such a language. GLACIAL SOIL If Muir's first interest was in the glaciers as sculptors, he also wished to show that the glacier was the primary creator of the whole landscape. He tried to fill out his picture of the Sierran landscape by speaking not only of the polished granite domes, but also of the sediment filled valleys below them. !f he was going to claim that the glaciers removed more than |