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Show 194 be understood as an attempt to see a world which contains and yet transcends opposites which are implicit in the act of human perception. The Yin and Yang of the world are inseparably joined; a dark period of glaciation is part of the baptism of the landscape into light. The power of the sun became the power of the ice which hid the Sierra from light, killing and creating life at the same time. Glaciers made mountains by tearing them down. All such paradoxes suggest the motto of Neil Bohr's coat of arms: Contraria Sunt Complementa. Beyond the metaphors of artist, tool, medium, beyond any flat map-like projection of the Sierra, beyond any mechanistic analysis, there is another way to see the world as all flow and cycle, all paradoxical and yet whole. In a sense, the Studies was a book which Muir needed to write to free himself. It looked back at past ideas and it looked forward to a clearer conception of the world. It was an agony to write and he was always running away from it. It failed to describe the Sierra with perfect justice, yet it began to establish the terms which Muir would use when he came to write what he really felt was necessary to a proper understanding of Nature. It was his first and last attempt to write a scientific book, and his suffering over it attested to his discomfort and final liberation from the conventions of scientific writing. He became aware of the limitations of the language he had inherited, and even while the Studies was motivated by his awareness of how poorly others had written |