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Show 544. might serve as "a sort of foundation for more than one volume." It was five years before he sorted out the chaotic and casual assortment of remembrances, and he seems to have decided that the best method of presentation was to juxtapose incidents. He also attempted to comprehend, in one short volume, the lessons of his first twenty-five years. By the juxtaposition of incidents, the structure of this book suggested that Muir's life consisted of an alternation between wilderness and civilization. As it originally appeared, first published serially in Atlantic Monthly at Muir's request, it was divided into four sections, "My Boyhood," "Plunge into the Wilderness," "Lessons of the Wilderness," and "Out of the Wilderness," the last section ending when Muir left "the Wisconsin University for the University of the Wilderness." Clearly he meant to dramatize the dilemma of a youth caught between two worlds. In an almost painstaking way, he argued that his personal odyssey consisted in transcending a Scylla and Charybdis, where the natural Indian-like savagery of youth beckoned on one side, while the rote education of school and home on the other side threatened, by rigid discipline, to crush any development of sensibility. He believed he was saved, not by the Bible he had to memorize, nor by his aggressive and savage youthful energy, but by the poetry of Burns, and by the inexhaustible wonders of Nature. So too, when he arrived in America, even after he had lost the savagery of boyhood, he would need to resist the dulling labor and cares of farm life, and an interest in mere mechanical inventions. He would |