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Show 565. summer to be a temporary experiment, but old Muir knew something about the laws of life. He only hoped to save a specimen section of his young and innocent wildness. When Muir's later books juxtaposed wilderness and civilization, they indicated Muir's staunch belief that the two could not be reconciled. When these books refused to create a pastoral middle ground between the wild and the civilized, when the hero of these books refused to settle down, it was because Muir always refused to believe such a compromise was possible. It was not "progress" but only a sad historical necessity which destroyed the dreams of his youth. So it was with his life: once he had been civilized, he could never return to the wild and innocent state of the narrator of First Summer. His only victory might be in the image of the struggle for freedom which he could write. Yet I believe the young Muir presented in First Summer is subtly different from the one I introduced in early chapters of this book. As Muir looked back on his early years in Yosemite, he tended to see himself as less rebellious and also less dependent on human society than he really had been. The young Muir of First Summer does not attack the values of civilization, nor does he question explicitly the values of books and book-making. He does not act the rough wild man who was disliked by residents of Yosemite Valley. He does not see himself in conflict with the tourists or the shepherds. Neither does he show the real need he had for intellectual contact with the Butlers and Carrs and Keiths who spoke |