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Show 4. Muir began consciously and categorically to deny, point by point, many nineteenth century assumptions about God, Man, and Nature. He was not only leaving civilization and community for the wilderness. He was also discarding the values he had learned in a farming community, in an academic community, and in the industrial city. He was attempting to reestablish a new set of values congruent with the laws of the Universe. This is the significance of the inscription, "John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe," which is written inside the cover of this and a succeeding journal which pertained to Muir's first winter in California. He had left the Garden for the Wilderness, and knew that his family and Christian friends would think of him as an outlaw. He wrote to Jeanne Carr that he wished he could be more moderate in his desires, but could not. So for him there would be no rest. It is hard at first to see what Garden he thought he was leaving, as he began his self enforced exile. From a century away, his life in the 1860's hardly seems idyllic. Yet so much had opened up for him during those years. After the authoritarian dominance of his father at home, the University of Wisconsin must have seemed almost edenic. He found himself surrounded with people who were not only doing things, but also treated him with respect. Even in Muir's worst times, the new world that opened to him in Madison must have been wonderful in its intellectual richness and social possibilities. When he travelled on to Canada, and later Indianapolis, he discovered that he could find a place for himself, as a valuable working member |
