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Show 218, exercise in spiritual and expressive discipline. After attempting to describe the falls as "infuriate waters" which roared, screamed, and hissed, like "a perfect hell of conflicting demons," he realized, But I speak after the manner of men, for there was no look nor syllable of fury among all the songs and gestures of these living waters. No thought of war, no complaining discord, not the faintest breath of confusion. One stupendous unit of light and song perfect and harmonious as any in heaven. Just as the catastrophic mechanism Whitney proposed to account for the magnitude of Yosemite Valley suggested chaos and disunity, the bottom falling out, so the view of flood as a fearful and exceptional event was also an illusion of chaos. In Muir's cosmos there were no singular phenomena. If men spoke of a fifty year flood, a Jubilee of Waters, what was fifty years to Nature? Such storms merely telescoped geological history, making visible a process, a flow which was normally too subtle for human eyes. Muir could see in one day what normally took many seasons. He had gained a revelation, not simply a memory, and this experience remained alive: Visions like these do not remain with us as mere maps and pictures - flat shadows cast upon our minds, to brighten, at times, when touched by association or will, and fade again from our view, like landscapes in the gloaming. They saturate every fibre of the body and soul, |