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Show 198. in 1870, he wished to remain in exile and send down his letters, which he did with the inestimable help of Jeanne Carr. I call them Stormy Sermons because they embody the true gospel which Muir articulated in the early seventies, while he lived in the mountains. In this chapter I will be talking not about his scientific but about his expressive language, the language of his poetry and religion. He spoke two languages because he was advised, by Jeanne Carr and others, that he would have to divide his sensibility if he wanted to publish his views; and so he attempted to visualize two different audiences when he wrote, pretending that the reader of a magazine like Overland Monthly was himself two different persons. This strategy might have been disastrous to his final goal - the full and whole appreciation of Man's need for Nature - since the distinction between science and spirit would lead to a view of Nature divided into material and spiritual aspects. This he wished to avoid. He had arrived at his wholeness by essentially mystical means and felt himself to be a part of a larger cosmic order when he was in the woods, in the mountains. But down in the lowlands men might fail to understand the essential unity of his linked paradoxes. "Destruction is creation," he would intone in the Studies. Concours discordia rerum: the triumph of cosmos over chaos would always be his principal theme. He had heard cosmic music, but by the time it reached the cities, the symphony sounded chaotic. To use a historical |