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Show 215 year would shine in the middle sky of a life like yours." The two might drift along like winged seeds, bathe in the mountains' light, drink pure mountain winds. Since all men were children of Nature, Muir ended, "I wish you were here this night to be trotted and dumpled on this mountain knee." Here was a perfect answer to the gospel of civilization, but not a sermon Muir could write for popular magazines. Perhaps earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are a perfect test of one's true attitude toward Nature. Earthquake fear has always been a kind of social psychosis in California, perhaps because men do not want to believe that they are subject to powers beyond human control. Earthquakes suggest a kind of fate, and insist that men are not the lords of creation. The way men speak of "Natural Catastrophe" indicates their attitude. This expression, born in the fog which enveloped civilized minds, indicated, to Muir.- that cultured language too was born in the fog. Men called earthquakes bad because they harmed humans and human artifacts. When, nearly forty years later, Muir would respond to the San Francisco Earthquake in very different terms from the ones he used in 1872, he indicated the extent to which he had become civilized. It was fine to love Nature when she exhibited herself in more moderate forms on her pleasant days, but the true test of men's love came when she did not please, but paid men no mind. This, we might say, was the test of a real faith. This was the same message which George Santayana delivered in California five years after the San Francisco Earthquake. |
