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Show 345. towns, only about twenty came to the daylight of Shasta last season. . . . there is no daylight in towns, and the weary public ought to know that there is light here, and I for one clear my skirts from the responsibility of silence by shouting a cordial come. This enthusiastic invitation is ever present in Muir's letters to the Bulletin. It is based on a philosophy very similar to that which Olmsted articulated nearly a decade earlier in his report to the California Legislature, on the management of the Yosemite Grant. Olmsted thought that "The power of scenery to affect men is, in a large way, proportionate to the degree of civilization. . . . " Savages, for instance, were not much affected by beauty. But the appreciation of scenery required mental exercise, and paradoxically the city dweller was so mentally fatigued by concern for his future, "laying up wealth," attending to "small and petty details," that he was dulled to any interest in the present moment "for itself and at the moment it is enjoyed." Thus Olmsted believed that the appreciation of scenery was necessary to the civilized person, as a release from cares which civilization had thrown upon his shoulders, was necessary to the sanity which would advance civilization in the future. Mind you, Olmsted knew that the farmer and his wife suffered also. He stated, as Garland did twenty Years later, that the asylums were filled with the wives of the "Independent American Farmer." Like Muir, however, he was most fearful for the urban citizen. |
