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Show 210 life he found so satisfying. He did not want to change himself. Rather he wished to entice others to come to his world. The knot of his problem is right here. Could he learn to write for popular magazines like Overland or Harper's without unrooting himself? What we now know - that working in and through a medium, with its own conventions, has a way of shaping the mind of the creator - Muir also suspected. Popular literature and industrial tourism have this in common, they vulgarize the writer and tour guide as well as the reader and tourist. Muir was on the brink of a very dangerous abyss and annihilation here was more likely than it had been when he climbed into the bergshrund of Red Mountain's glacier. Falling into this occupation of a popular writer, he could endanger the very message he had a sacred mission to convey. He would have to stand over the abyss between wilderness and civilization and mediate between the vision he had gained in the mountains and the expectations of his readers. It is no surprise that he struggled with the strategy of mediation in his early essays and had difficulty controlling his tone. He was deeply troubled by the "mist-rags" of language. He seemed to pay sometimes painfully close attention to the key terms of other writers, and was equally attentive to his own diction. What becomes clear enough through comparison, is that Thoreau's language of argument became a model for his own. if Emerson had been the mentor for a young man who had left the family farm, Thoreau was the superior craftsman to whom a serious writer who wanted to say a word for Nature |