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Show 3. is probably the most self-conscious of all Muir's journals. Below the first sketch which depicted himself planning his journey outside Louisville, Kentucky, he wrote, "The world was all before them where to choose." Did these words mean that Muir thought of himself in terms of Milton's unhappy couple, exiled from the Garden? Certainly he carried the great Puritan epic, Paradise Lost, in his backpack, along with his plant press, his Bible, and a copy of Burns' poems. But what Garden had he left, and what wilderness did he seek? One might even ask, was he Adam, or Eve, or both? If he was setting out to be an American Adam, on a model articulated by Thoreau, then he seemed not yet aware that he was cleansing the "conventional or traditional man; in order precisely to bring into being the natural man." Yet he was conscious of making another fresh and new start, perhaps not of his own choosing. That had become a pattern of his life during the sixties. Leaving the farm, leaving the university, leaving the United States for Canada, then leaving the woods of Canada for work in the city of Indianapolis, and fina nearly leaving his eyesight behind in a machine shop. Now he was leaving civilization behind altogether. He felt, almost immediately, the precariousness and loneliness of his situation, and it took him over a month on the road before he could begin to make some sense of his attitudes as he wrote in his journal. He slowly began to realize that he was approaching a new and boundless perspective, which I like to compare to the one Thoreau began to develop in his last years, after Walden. |