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Show 453. Like Yosemite, The Mountains of California had a living and sacred river running through i t . Despite the picturesque language, despite the s i g n i f i c a n t s u b s t i t u t i o n of "Nature" or "Beauty" for "God" and "the Lord," Muir's pantheism flowed, from the top of Mount R i t t e r to the Central Valley. And since he had been to the European Alps in the summer of 1893, Muir wisely realized that the Sierra had i t s own wholeness, and did not need to be b u t t r e s s e d by language which referred to it as the California Alps. He had learned not to make this false comparison. What was l e f t out of the book was as significant as what was included. Although Muir's t e n t a t i v e table of contents had not included the ouzel or the Douglas s q u i r r e l , i t had included "Wild Wool." But the actual 1894 contents of the book focused on the more moderate and pastoral landscape of the Sierra, and included, with the exception of "Bee Pastures," Muir's more moderate arguments. Further, this book was not really about a l l of the mountains of California, but about the Sierra, and even then did not devote much time to describing what Johnson c a l l e d "the three great gorges, the Hetch Hetchy, Yosemite, and the Kings River Canon." Muir knew that he was writing neither a guidebook nor an argument. He was compiling a symbolic version of his own s p i r i t u a l journey in the seventies, a volume which might give the general reader an insight into the path to vision. Thus the s t r u c t u r e of his book: the reader was drawn into the g l a c i a l h i s t o r y of the Sierra, into the womb of the |
