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Show 190. However, Muir did not expect his reader to see as a God, but only as a glacier might see. While this perspective may put a man in his proper and rather small place, it also requires an expansion of consciousness, into time and space. Muir asked a reader to come into the mountains when he concluded, When we walk the pathways of Yosemite glaciers and contemplate their separate works - the mountains they have shaped, the canons they have furrowed, the rocks they have worn, and broken, and scattered in moraines - on reaching Yosemite, instead of being overwhelmed as at first with its uncompared magnitude, we ask Is this all? wondering that so mighty a concentration of energy did not find yet grander expression. When we have seen from this perspective, we will have learned to suspect that phenomena which we used to call sublime are in reality neither chaotic, nor beyond comprehension. Because Muir wanted his reader to judge the history and beauty of the landscape in terms appropriate to its majesty, he knew that he would have to interpret the Sierra not as a sublime landscape, but as a sacred one. He knew, as Kant knew, that those things in Nature which we call sublime are also those things which, because of their limitless power or measureless size, seem beyond man's aesthetic judgment. Muir's metaphors which suggest classification and the Tree of Life and organic unity were not meant to reduce the majesty or power of the Sierra's creation; rather they were meant to make the size and power of the forces which created it comprehensible, harmonious, |
