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Show 392 continuing serial structure of Picturesque California. The project dragged on for three years. Meanwhile, the conditions under which he was writing were unpleasant. As his father-in-law was getting sick and approaching his death, Muir had to isolate himself in San Francisco in a hotel, to get anything done at all. Even though he was editor, his publishers seemed to have the final word about his decisions. His haste produced a kind of telescoping of experience which led to repetition. His visions of sunsets and alpenglow, on Mount Ritter, on Mount Hood, and in Alaska, were either described as "effects," which is to say impressions, or else as "terrestrial manifestations of God." The latter phrase, after being used several times in the series, began to lose its interest and become a cliche. He seemed to wonder why he was writing a book called picturesque anything. In his essay on Alaska he said, To sketch picturesque bits definitely bounded is comparatively an easy task - a lake in the woods, a glacier meadow, a cascade in its dell, or even a grand mountain landscape. . . . But in this web of scenery embroidering the northern coast there is such indefinite expansiveness. Illustrations didn't help much. There is a nice painting by Thomas Hill of the Muir Glacier, but in the book it loses the luminescence of the original. As one senses, even with a recent book on Glacier Bay, many pictures of ice cubes on heaches do not really give a sense of being there. The |