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Show 233. appreciating the snowf lowers of May. If the chaparral was God's country, so was the summit of Shasta. If, on the next day, "the storm on the mountaintop vanished like a dream," it was just as real as the life below. There are flowers and there are flowers: all are part of the flow. "Snow Storm on Mount Shasta," the most extreme of Muir's published Stormy Sermons, is also his purest and most intricate, Born out of his mystical temperament and his scrupulous attention to geological history, it is an elaborate and subtle allegory. In a world of fire and ice, a world which can be understood and appreciated only by the exercise of great discipline, a world which seems to have nothing of humanity in it, Muir found beauty. Yet it was a strangely beautiful world where the man who sat close to the noxious gases which kept him alive dared not breathe deeply, where a man who wanted to enjoy the snow dared not let himself be drifted over. This was a place where becoming "part and parcel of Nature" entailed great risk. If the whole adventure was like a dream, Thoreau had concluded Walden by comparing our lives to dreams: "The light that puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. The sun is but a morning star." Only in the storms of the mountains could a man be sure that he had awakened to reality- All below was illusion. This was the gospel of the Stormy Sermons. |