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Show 202. To Muir's "glacial eye" the mystery of Nature became a living truth and could be known by those who were willing to repeat the mystical experience of living in the wilderness, as a Christian would live in Christ. Here was his radical reason for writing, even for popular magazines. He was a fundamentalist of the wilderness, was radical in the root sense of the word, by going to the foundation or source of things, a botanist who insisted that all things must grow from sturdy roots, if they were to survive. The roots of the mystery, that is to say the roots of the radically enigmatic, were in his mystic experience. When describing expressive language, Philip Wheelwright shows that these two ideas, the mystical, and mystery, are "deeply interrelated, but analytically distinguishable." Muir knew that mystical experience - the risky business out in the mountains - was a path to the mystery, while his father preferred the safer and more secure recourse to The Book. Realizing the problems he would face in explicating his radical vision, Muir knew that he would have to do two things well; he would have to recommend his transcendental experience, and then validate it by the mountains. He knew it was not enough for men to go to the wilderness; they had to see truly and live by the laws which Nature exhibited there. If men would live by Nature's gospel, they would have to be rooted in her. |