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Show even fantastic questions about Muir. What, one wanted to know, if Muir came to Yosemite in 1957? Would he team up with Robbins, or choose to climb with Harding? That is an interesting question. Was Muir a Taoist, a Zen Buddhist, a pantheist, asked one friend. He deserved an answer, not a dismissal. Another friend wanted to know what would have happened if Muir had become friends with Ishi. That was a profound question, but I was not sure I could answer it. Then there were the paradoxes of Muir's life. How could he hate book making so much in the 1870's and yet become a writer? How was it possible for the young man who hated tourists to become the genial narrator of Our National Parks who encouraged all kinds of tourism? How was it possible for Muir to advocate so much road and trail construction after the turn of the century? So I began to ask those kinds of questions. Did Muir really develop an ecological perspective? Did he become truly enlightened while wandering in the Sierra? What happened to his enlightenment when he tried to bring it down from the mountains? Did the Sierra Club really represent his true attitudes? Was he successful in the politics of conservation? The most serious issue was raised by Pete Clecak, a member of my doctoral committee. "You are either onto a fascinating personality (from the eighties on) or a shallow one, or rather a person who might be described as complete in his earlier years, after reaching the peak, and unable to integrate other parameters of life in his later years. If he is a rich, complex man, then his critical biography ought to be a sort of |