OCR Text |
Show 253. Though he could do nothing about this social calamity, Muir could resolve his internal conflicts, his fears of alligators, and his view of the landscape as "very sickly, entangled, overflowed, and unwalkable." Through conscious effort he forced himself to give up an anthropocentric outlook by the end of his journey. Yet there is something almost miraculous in his transformation as it is written, an abrupt conversion followed by preachy biocentric conclusions which suggest that he had not fully transcended his early prejudices. Nevertheless, he knew he would have to, and began the readjustment of his consciousness. Seeing as an alligator might was the end of a process and the beginning of one as well. First he had to detach himself from certain limiting human perspectives. What was for him a sickly environment he also knew was edenic for alligators. A man could not walk on water, yet had grown out of the environment where he evolved. He had become Nature's jack-of-all-trades, but was still master of none, despite his so-called "divine aspirations." Because Muir knew this when he began to puzzle over evolutionary problems, he would not easily fall into an opinion like Huxley's, that since Nature's world was a Darwinian jungle, Man would have to extend his own ecological transformation, the English Garden, ever outward to replace Nature's realm. On the title page of a volume in Muir's library, Bancroft's History of the United States, one finds the words of Emerson: Man is fallen - Nature is erect and serves as a dif- |